Prioritising the SDGs for Galapagos

In 2018, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) were declared public policy in Ecuador and the Galapagos archipelago was selected as a pioneer province to work towards achieving them. In 2021, following a request for support from the Galapagos Governing Council, our team led a collaborative process to prioritise and contextualise the SDG targets for the islands. Through a series of workshops with over 50 policy-makers, NGO representatives and community members, we developed a list of 40 contextualised SDG targets, each considered to be urgent for Galapagos (see www.ods-galapagos.com for the full list). We then led a second process to analyse the potential synergies between these 40 targets and identify those with the most positive impact overall. The top three identified were eliminating corruption and bribery, ensuring equal rights and access, and increasing resilience against disasters. Following this, we developed an online tool to aid understanding the 40 targets and the interactions between them.