A Nexus Approach to Sustainable Development

Stream 1: Select a nexus 

Applications for catalyst and synthesis grants can address at least one question associated with the identified thematic research areas. This year’s call highlights four “nexus areas” that are used to describe the intersecting challenges of the SDGs and the importance of working across silos to address these challenges. The research questions for this call are aligned with both the themes and nexus areas as described in the sections below. 

The SDGs@UofT’s research program includes the following four research themes:  

1. Establishing transition pathways for sustainability: Transition pathways are defined as semi-coherent patterns of major changes in the configuration of a socio-technical system, which are subject to continual processes of political contestation. They provide a useful approach to understand, define, and implement ways to enable equitable systems-level change and identify and address bottlenecks to overcome.  

2. Measuring progress towards achieving the SDGs: There are several indicators to measure progress to facilitate development for sustainability. While the intersectoral nature of the SDGs represents opportunities for equitable societal change, it also gives rise to certain measurement challenges, including data availability, and the perpetuation of measurement in silos. Relevant and useful data across sectors can contribute to the construction of useful composite indices as integrated frameworks to appraise the achievement of the SDGs at global, and country level scales. 

3. Designing and evaluating interventions and instruments for sustainability: research on measuring the effectiveness of implementation processes and outcomes of interventions (e.g., policies, programs, strategies) with consideration to equity and within and across sectors is needed to measure progress towards the SDGs and inform future global goals post 2030.  

4. Exploring dynamic synergies among the SDGs: The SDGs aim to tackle multiple complex challenges. They are interdependent but also inherent tensions within and between goals that produce diverging results. To strive towards equitable and effective, the interdependencies among the SDGs should be further evaluated both across and within the SDGs.  

Applicants are encouraged to address one or more of the following research themes through one of the following three nexus areas: 

1. Food systems, gender, and environment 

2. Education, inequality and the SDGs  

3. Sports, Health and Community Development  

4. Technology, health, work and inequality 

The section below describes the nexus areas and relevant questions aligned with the nexus and research themes. 

Food systems, gender, and environment: Food systems are faced with the “triple challenge” of simultaneously ensuring food security and nutrition to meet population needs, supporting the livelihoods of people working in the food supply chain, while also doing so in an environmentally sustainable way. The first United Nations Food Systems Summit in September 2021 (UNFSS) also emphasized the importance of gender inclusive food systems that promote gender equality and women’s empowerment and resulted in the launch of the coalition ‘Making Food Systems Work for Women and Girls’. Research has shown that women’s entrepreneurship in food systems globally has been less resilient to shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic compared to men’s. This is because women entrepreneurs often operate in sectors highly impacted by this crisis, such as food services or retail. In these sectors, women entrepreneurs, and workers also subject to precarious working conditions including poorer wages, limited or no access to health and social benefits and financial insecurity, which can all affect their individual, family and community well-being.  

Transition Pathways 

• How do we promote food security and nutrition through transition pathways that foster the capacity of women entrepreneurs and business owners in diverse communities? 

Policy Instruments and Interventions 

• What policies and other instruments are needed to strengthen the resilience of women entrepreneurs to shocks to and stresses in food systems in diverse communities?  

• What are effective interventions for creating jobs and business opportunities for women that foster employment and leadership in food systems in which women are historically underrepresented? 

Measurement 

• How do we best measure the relative contribution of women to transformative food systems change and leverage data to address barriers to their participation? 

Synergies and trade-offs 

• What are the structures needed to enable intersectoral approaches to policy development that address the synergies and trade-offs of the triple challenge of food systems while ensuring women’s full participation in food systems at all levels (i.e. local and global)? 

• What synergies can be leveraged across career pathways for employment and entrepreneurship for youths globally? 

Education, inequality, and the SDGs: Educational access is a goal in and of itself (SDG 4.0) while also being a pathway to meeting multiple SDGs and is a critical contributor to inequalities in health outcomes, skills development and training, wage parity, human rights, and political participation, among other issues. Research is needed to address the impacts of inequitable access to quality education on other SDGs, including poverty, labor market opportunities, and conflict.  

Transition pathways  

• What is the role that formal education systems play in supporting other transition pathways?  

Policies and Instruments:  

• What changes are needed to traditional educational systems and curricula to address transition pathways.  

• What reforms and policies are needed to address systematic inequalities in educational access in ways that are both affordable and equitable? 

Measurement:  

• What types of indicators and methods can document the role of unequal educational opportunities on other SDGs?  

• Can the mediating role of inequality in education in meeting other SDGs be quantified and measured?  

Synergies and trade-offs  

• What types of informal and formal curricular reforms can support other transition pathways?  

• Given that poverty is a barrier to advancing on all other SDGs, how can we effectively combine approaches to simultaneously address poverty alongside other interventions (e.g. reducing poverty alongside investment in quality education). 

Sports, Health and Community Development: Article 37 of the SDGs Declaration states that “Sport is also an important enabler of sustainable development. We recognize the growing contribution of sport to the realization of development and peace in its promotion of tolerance and respect and the contributions it makes to the empowerment of women and of young people, individuals and communities as well as to health, education and social inclusion objectives.” This statement is both a recognition and driver of the global Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) sector, comprised of various actors and stakeholders that organize and implement sport-based programs towards sustainable development. While this sector has grown significantly in the past two decades, it is still largely unregulated and funded precariously. It also tends to mythologize sports as a panacea for development. Empirical, theoretically driven and critical informed research is needed to assess the role and contribution of sports globally to sustainable development.   

Transition Pathways 

• What are the barriers to promoting and implementing sport-based programs that are designed to address the SDGs? What (still) needs to be done to convince stakeholders of the role for sport? 

Policy Instruments and Interventions 

• What are the mechanisms needed to strengthen sports programs and policies aimed at supporting the achievement of the SDGs?  

• How can we scale up SDP programs to make them more connected, integrated and farther reaching? 

Measurement 

• What kinds of context-sensitive indicators, methods and approaches can and should be used to analyze sport and SDP?  

• How can these studies contribute to theories of change that are replicable in other contexts? 

• Where and how can research results feedback into policy development and improvement, particularly in places where sport programs have not successfully contributed to the goals of sustainable development?  

Synergies and Tradeoffs 

• How can the global sport and SDP sectors connect to other, more mainstream or normative, sustainable development sectors and actors?  

• To what extent can sport be integrated into the larger development sector? 

Technology, health, work and inequality: While new AI technologies promise to transform health care with enhanced predictive analytics, reduced clinician labour, and new forms of care provision, these same systems are often built using private generative models that include deeply biased data (including gender and racial biases) and require commodity gig labour often from global south contexts for human labeling and fine tuning. How do we balance the potential health benefits with the risks of increasing individual or country-level inequities through their development and use?   

Transition Pathways 

• Can small public models, built using local public health data, replace large language models, particularly for use in specific situated contexts? 

Policies and Instruments 

• How can the labour and data needed to produce AI models for use in health care be made more equitable? 

Synergies and trade-offs 

• Can AI technologies be developed that maintain the expertise and knowledgeable practices of healthcare workers, rather than replacing or deskilling these workers?