Kolb-Localizing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: A Spotlight on Djibouti

Αρετή (Arete) Journal of Excellence in Global Leadership | Vol. 1 No. 1 | 2022

Introduction Pandemics, war, and drought have been topics of discussion and worry in 2022. Despite the collective emergence into a world post-Covid-19, the weary global society continues to confront crisis after crisis. Given the current circumstances, it is difficult to keep an optimistic perspective on global success and progress. Nevertheless, global society has made steady progress toward a unified and healthy planet (see Figure 1). As shown in Figure 1 from Gapminder (2022), income and health depict the social progress of five countries. In 2022, Luxembourg is the healthiest and wealthiest country in the world and Burundi is the most unhealthy and impoverished. Although individual countries experience fluctuations, gradual global progress is illustrated even in the case of Burundi.

Figure 1 Country GDP per Person

Source: Gapminder, 2020 (https://www.gapminder.org/tools/)

The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent global values to guide international policymaking (United Nations, 2016) and have become the standard on which to base the measurements of international development (Willis & Kumar, 2020). The literature surrounding the UN Goals includes praise, critique, and exploration of drivers and challenges of implementation. A study by Geels (2002), found that developmental progress is more likely to occur in localized settings. Following the call to research introduced by Jönsson and Bexell (2021) who studied drivers and obstacles of localizing the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda in Tanzania, this study explored the challenges of localizing the sustainable development goals in Djibouti. Djibouti’s ad vantages are uniquely all its own, however, its challenges are not unlike small states, small island states, and post-colonial states which may benefit from Djibouti’s case. The study draws on a range of secondary sources; it is the first known study to attempt to analyze SDG implementation in Djibouti. It is structured in two major sections. Section one provides an overview of literature on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, theories of localization from various fields, and an introduction to Djibouti. Section two then examines Djibouti specifically,

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