Assessing Sustainable Development Performance and Alternative Concepts in a Group of Developed Countries in Europe

This study evaluates the progress of 31 countries, including EU member states, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom (UK), towards the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SD) and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) over the period 2012–2020. The analysis employs indicators from the EU SDG indicator set, which monitors progress towards the SDGs within the EU context. The objective is to identify which sustainability concepts these countries gravitate towards as they advance towards the SDGs and specific indicators within the EU SDG set. The study assesses progress and alignment with the overarching concept of sustainable development as well as with more focused practical approaches, such as green economy/growth and circular economy, and more complex alternative concepts like degrowth and compassionate economy. The biclustering method is applied to uncover relationships between countries and indicators, resulting in clusters that combine five groups of countries with ten groups of indicators. These clusters exhibit varying degrees of progress across sustainable development, green economy/growth, circular economy, compassionate economy, and degrowth based on the indicator values. Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Sweden are identified as the top performers in overall sustainability. Notably, Switzerland and Norway show the greatest alignment with degrowth and compassionate economy concepts, while the Netherlands and Italy excel in circular economy and green economy/growth. The novelty of this article lies in the innovative application of the biclustering method combined with point-based evaluation of indicators within the SDG set, providing a unique perspective on the progress of these 31 countries towards sustainability. Furthermore, the identification of countries’ inclination towards specific sustainability concepts represents a key innovation in this work.