Measuring transboundary impacts in the 2030 Agenda
Conceptual approach and operationalisation
This paper explores the conceptual framing and measurement of transboundary impacts
in the context of the 2030 Agenda. It starts by defining transboundary impacts and
reviewing different measurement approaches used so far. It then proposes a typology
of transboundary impacts, classified depending on the type of international flows
involved: financial flows, trade flows, movements of people, environmental flows and
knowledge transfers. For each of these flows, transboundary impacts can be either
positive or negative, depending on the aspect considered and on the conditions in
origin and destination countries. Based on this framework, the paper presents evidence
from a qualitative survey of experts about the potential impact of these five flows
on each of the 17 Goals and 169 targets of the 2030 Agenda. Transboundary impacts
are deemed by experts to be quite pervasive across SDGs, but also limited in scope
to a small number of well-identified targets. Finally, the framework is operationalised
for some specific areas within each of the five types of flows mentioned above, with
the help of some proxy indicators. At the global level, the five types of transboundary
relationships are dominated by three macro-regions, namely China, the United States-Canada
and Europe, mainly reflecting the large size of these regions in most cases. When
the assessment is conducted in relative terms (i.e. when impacts are normalised by
population size or GDP), the picture becomes more nuanced, as 7 out of the 11 world
regions considered record at least two large transboundary impacts. While this operationalisation
is only meant to show how the proposed framework could be applied to concrete cases,
the paper recommends its applications to other areas within each of the five flows,
based on a richer set of indicators.
Published on November 16, 2021
In series:OECD Papers on Well-being and Inequalitiesview more titles