ENABLING ACCOUNTABLE AND BETTER SDG IMPLEMENTATION: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM EXTERNAL PUBLIC AUDIT ORGANIZATIONS

The challenges of the United Nations’ Agenda for Sustainable Development (the 2030 Agenda) that lead to setbacks in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) underscore the need for an objective review and evaluation of SDG implementation. External public audit organizations (EAOs)—due to their independence from governments and mandates to audit national development programs—are well-positioned to address this need. However, ways in which EAOs contribute to SDG implementation are explored fragmentarily, with the primary focus on SDG-related audits conducted by supreme audit institutions. While this gap in the literature and knowledge poses risks of lagging progress toward the 2030 Agenda, this study aimed to explore how EAOs contribute to SDG implementation through analyzing the case of Kazakhstani EAOs. The publicly available data of three randomly selected EAOs, including annual audit plans for 2018-2024 and conclusions on budget execution submitted to parliamentarians from 2019 to 2024, were analyzed through a qualitative directed content analysis. The results of the study indicate that EAOs’ audits tagged as related to SDGs are in demand by stakeholders. In their conclusions, EAOs highlight gaps and problems in SDG-informed national public policies and recommendations, thereby contributing to the implementation of SDGs in an accountable and better way. Nevertheless, tagging audits and analytical products as related to SDGs (when applicable), adding SDG-related audits to the audit portfolio, integrating a comprehensive evaluation of SDG implementation into the conclusions on budget execution, and assessing the impacts of auditors’ work are needed to enable more effective contributions to sustainable development from EAOs.