Policy and political challenges for a better world: The United States and China pathways towards the 2030 Agenda
本文构建了一个综合可持续发展指数，比较美国和中国在国家及地方层面的可持续发展进展，发现美国整体排名更高，但中国在目标协同和空间分布上更均衡，两国都存在地方差距和地球相关目标进展不足的问题。
The Agenda 2030 poses critical elements regarding the transition towards a more sustainable development. This paper aims at exploring and comparing the path of sustainable development within the United States and China at the subnational level. An index of Integrated Sustainable Development is introduced to measure local sustainable development on an internationally-comparable scale. This Index is computed both at the national and subnational level and the resulting scores are compared within and across the two countries, also through the adoption of convergence and cluster analysis, allowing to answer four questions: Are the US and China moving towards a sustainable development agenda? Are the current achievements uniformly distributed within the two countries? Are states/provinces converging towards a more uniform level of sustainable development? Do the existing differences and analogies between states and provinces give rise to common clusters across the two countries? The results lead to one robust conclusion: while the US can claim a better result in the national and subnational rankings of sustainable development, China exhibits a more balanced achievement in terms of synergies across Goals and spatial distribution. Nonetheless, both countries are characterized by subnational disparities and scarce achievements of Planet-related Goals. Policy recommendations are discussed accordingly.