Applications for catalyst and synthesis grants should address at least one question associated with the identified thematic research areas. This year’s call focuses on three “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. Energy, work, and climate change
3. Work, poverty, and justice

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)?

Energy, work & climate change: A global movement has been underway to harness the potential of state policy to address the significant and interrelated challenges of environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, and energy insecurity. A decade ago, a Global Green New Deal (GGND) emerged as a policy framework to stimulate economic recovery and simultaneously improve the sustainability of the world economy. The strategic objective of the GGND is to make proven renewable technologies universally affordable, so that renewable energy becomes the default choice for the world. Its alignment with the SDGs brings into focus the need to adopt policies that scale up resources needed for a big investment push led by the public sector. The overlaps between the GND and SDGs are numerous and speak to the universal challenges that each of these agendas seek to address.

Transition pathways

• What are effective policies to support transition pathways to renewable clean energy sources, that are also affordable and generate employment for historically marginalized communities?

Policy and Instruments

• What policy instruments best address economic inequities and promote social justice to ensure that the benefits of transition to clean energy are redistributed fairly among and across communities?
• How can we effectively scale up innovative solutions to encourage the formalization and growth of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises that are equitable, accessible, and reduce carbon emissions?

Measurement

• What are innovative methodological and measurement approaches that simultaneously evaluate GGND actions and progress towards multiple SDGs?

Synergies and trade-offs

• How do we measure and better understand the synergies and trade-offs that can emerge from the simultaneous deployment of integrated mechanisms for the GGND, and actions that promote sustained, inclusive sustained economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all.

Work, poverty & justice: Decent work, employment creation, social protection, rights at work, and social dialogue are integral elements of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. However, profound changes in the nature and availability of work over the past few decades have led to an increase in labour inequities. Work is explicitly or substantially linked to multiple SDGs and provides an entry point for the study of health, climate change, skills development and training, wage parity, human rights, and health, among other issues. The intersection of work with social identities such as gender, age, race/ethnicity, education, migration status, and socioeconomic status has widespread implications for addressing the SDGs by 2030. For instance, women are concentrated in fundamentally different jobs than men, who still largely dominate senior leadership and management positions, whereas women still hold most caregiving and lower-paid administrative positions. Research on effective policy and program interventions that address global concerns about the impact of labor market conditions on youths, migrants, and other groups structurally made vulnerable is needed.

Transition pathways

• What are barriers to achieving fairer labor practices and the creation of transition pathways to more sustainable and equitable work?

Policies and Instruments

• What are the mechanisms needed to strengthen employment programs and policies to improve the social and economic conditions of marginalized youth?

Measurement

• What types of context-sensitive indicators, methods, and approaches (e.g., narrative storytelling) should be considered to measure progress towards increased access to decent work that is equitable, safe, and dignified?

Synergies and trade-offs

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