Towards an Intervention Science for Sustainable Development

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are one of the most widely accepted frameworks worldwide to design policy interventions and implement them in an endeavour to create a sustainable future. A decade from 2015 has ensured a maturity of understanding in terms of localizing the globally agreed indicators to the grassroots level. However, achieving a given sustainability target is highly context-specific, and member states need to design custom structures and policies to achieve specific targets in their regions. This is called the problem of SDG localization . The dearth of relevant frameworks for representing and reasoning about sustainability and policy interventions has resulted in SDG localization efforts being pursued in silos and in an ad hoc manner. In this work, we address the problem of designing a representation framework for policy interventions toward achieving sustainability targets. We call this activity “ Intervention Science ” and develop three essential structures: Differential Impact Modeling that studies predicted change in SDG indicator, Collateral Impact Modeling to understand the side-effects of policy interventions, and Stability Profile Modeling to assess the sustainability of the interventions. We take up specific examples from SDG 2-Zero Hunger to showcase how policy instruments can be designed for specific SDG indicators.