Introduction

In 2015, the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the General Assembly of the United Nations1 laid out the aspirations of the international community for sustainable development to be achieved by 2030. As of June 2025, progress toward the 17 SDGs and 169 targets is measured by 234 unique indicators.

Despite the seemingly straightforward mechanism, measuring the progress of SDGs and their targets presents significant challenges. SDG indicators are lacking data, redundant, incomplete, and misaligned with local contexts and priorities.

To address these challenges, I propose an alternative framework for the post-2030 development goals that gives countries more flexibility to monitor progress according to their ability and local needs, while keeping the most important indicators comparable across all countries. Specifically, I suggest that going forward, the indicators underlying the post-2030 development goals encompass three components: (a) a concise set of global core indicators that require all countries to provide data, (b) a long list of global optional indicators to be adopted by countries at their discretion, and (c) custom indicators to be developed by countries according to their respective policy priorities, monitoring needs, and local contexts (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Proposed indicator framework for post-2030 international development goals.

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The current SDG indicator framework is too complex, redundant, and incomplete

SDG indicators suffer from insufficient availability and timeliness of data2,3. Although data coverage has grown steadily, approximately half the indicators for more than half of all countries have had less than two data points since 20154.

The immense volume and complexity of data requirements overwhelm the statistical capacity of many countries3. Many of the 234 unique indicators have sub-indicators (called “data series”); some sub-indicators require data disaggregation based on various attributes such as age and sex. The total cost for low- and middle-income countries to provide data for SDG indicators could amount to USD 44–45 billion over the period from 2015 to 20305. Moreover, SDG monitoring prioritizes countries’ own official data over international sources. This priority places a heavy reporting burden on countries while affecting data sufficiency, quality, and consistency6.

The second challenge is the redundancy of indicators that creates confusion and unnecessary burdens in data compilation. For example, the indicator “11.7.2 Proportion of persons victim of non-sexual or sexual harassment, by sex, age, disability status and place of occurrence, in the previous 12 months” is partially similar to the indicator “16.1.3 Proportion of population subjected to (a) physical violence, (b) psychological violence and/or (c) sexual violence in the previous 12 months,” but they are treated as independent indicators. Furthermore, because many pairs of SDG indicators are correlated7,8,9, the number of indicators can be streamlined10.

The third challenge is the incompleteness of the set of indicators. Some SDG targets are broad, ambiguous, complex, or multifaceted, such as Target 4.7: “By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.”

However large, the current set of SDG indicators cannot capture the full dimensions of all targets6. Instead of streamlining, SDG indicators could be expanded until they fully capture the most critical aspects of each target11. I recommend that we do both, streamline and expand. We can then make the streamlined global catalog mandatory for all countries, and the expanded version optional. The indicators can be further expanded at the national or local level by adding custom indicators to capture locally relevant aspects.

Finally, indicators can be misaligned with local needs and priorities. For instance, indicators (such as 14.5.1) related to marine areas, does not apply to landlocked countries; some indicators may have little relevance locally (e.g., “17.3.2 Volume of remittances as a proportion of total GDP” may have very little relevance to some countries’ economies). Yet other indicators may be applicable and relevant, but not a priority for some countries. Whereas applicability can be assessed objectively, relevance and priority depend on subjective perceptions of local contexts and policy priorities12. This subjectivity makes it difficult to develop common global indicators that are meaningful for all countries. If countries regard some indicators as neither relevant nor a priority, they are less likely to invest resources in their monitoring, leading to data deficiency or raising concerns over cross-country comparability.

A different indicator framework for the post-2030 international development goals

In designing an indicator framework for the international development goals after 2030, the target year of the SDGs, it is imperative to build on the experience of developing and implementing the SDG progress monitoring framework. While there is no consensus on what the post-2030 development goals may look like, United Nations member states have agreed to discuss how to advance sustainable development after 203013.

Most SDGs are unlikely to be achieved by 203014,15. Whether the current SDGs are extended beyond 203016, now is a good time to consider how to design a more effective indicator framework to monitor progress and achievements and facilitate implementation.

In this proposal (see Fig. 1 above), the global core indicators form a small subset of the global indicators, and all countries are required to provide data regularly that conform to internationally established methodologies and standards. Core indicators reduce the burden of data compilation for countries while enabling the monitoring of general progress towards the goals at the global and country levels. Countries and their external supporters can concentrate their resources on improving the data quality of the core indicators.

Core indicators may include those that are specifically intended for monitoring collectively at the global level (e.g., “1.5.3 Number of countries that adopt and implement national disaster risk reduction strategies in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030”). They may also include outcome indicators that can directly measure the fulfillment of the aspirations expressed in the language of the goals. Examples include “1.1.1 Proportion of population living below the international poverty line for SDG 1 (no poverty)” and the Gini coefficient (adopted in “10.4.2 Redistributive impact of fiscal policy on the Gini index”) or the Palma ratio for SDG 10 (reduced inequalities)17. At the same time, core indicators should be chosen so as to minimize redundancy.

Optional indicators would be used at the discretion of individual countries, based on their respective development strategies and monitoring capacity. The optional indicators would be provided as a long list of potentially useful metrics, accompanied by guidance on methodologies and standards for data compilation. They may include all SDG global non-core indicators and can be expanded to capture targets more comprehensively11.

This list would be further complemented by custom indicators set at the regional, national, or local levels. Custom indicators can be originally created or adapted from global indicators bespoke to address the challenge of misalignment with local needs and priorities.

The proposed framework addresses the observed challenge of data deficiency by reducing the number of global mandatory (core) indicators and the corresponding data compilation burden for countries. Enhanced statistical capacity is beneficial for timely, high-quality, and comparable data provision. Investments in statistical capacity development can be targeted at the core indicators. By giving a greater role to custom indicators, the proposed framework also addresses the issue of indicator misalignment with country relevance and priority. The incompleteness of the indicator set is resolved by encouraging countries to develop sufficient and fit-for-purpose indicators without requiring all countries to monitor every aspect of each target.

A streamlined set of core global indicators mitigates known challenges of SDG monitoring

The components of the proposed indicator framework are not new. The suggestion to streamline the global indicators has been made before18,19, and the use of custom indicators has already been integrated into the current SDGs indicator framework20. The United Nations General Assembly resolution that established the SDG indicator framework explicitly states that global indicators “will be complemented by indicators at the regional and national levels, which will be developed by Member States”21.

The novelty of the proposal lies in the integration of these components into an indicator framework that addresses the principal implementation challenges of sustainability goals: to integrate rather than silo the goals and targets by accounting for synergies and trade-offs between them22,23. These interconnections, which vary by palce and evolve over time, are best captured through context-specific analyses24,25. Furthermore, a strengthened review mechanism for national SDG plans and their implementation has been argued for25,26, and this proposal facilitates it. All these implementation challenges are better served by national and local customized targets and indicators.

What sets the current proposal apart is the streamlining of global mandatory indicators. Many studies focus only on how monitoring should be strengthened and expanded. An equally important question is what should be streamlined. Streamlining is a key aspect in this era of a bleak outlook for the resource availability to international development initiatives. The proposed framework calls for an efficient resource allocation for the development and data compilation of global indicators.

Conclusions

The proposed three-tier framework with a shortlist of mandatory core indicators and a wealth of optional global and local indicators has the advantage of mitigating the problems observed with the current SDG global indicator framework. This alternative framework reduces excessive data compilation burdens by limiting the number of core indicators to a concise list. It tackles data deficiency by allowing countries to choose nationally relevant indicators that they need anyway. It improves data comparability and timeliness by allowing the statistical capacity development to focus on the core indicators. It addresses incompleteness by encouraging countries to add custom indicators. It minimizes misalignment with country needs and priorities by insisting only on a minimal set of globally relevant indicators and otherwise giving freedom to pick and choose.

This proposal comes with its own risks, but they can be addressed. Custom indicators could enable cherry-picked implementation with watered-down goals and targets26,27. The need to choose global core indicators could cause political deadlock. To address these risks, further research is required on better governance mechanisms of plans and implementation of sustainable development at national and local levels26, as well as effective, scientific, and politically agreeable methodologies to identify the core indicators. A possible approach to improving the governance is to turn the existing SDG voluntary national review system into a mandatory national review system with greater participation and scrutiny of research institutions and civil society. Whatever the desirable framework may be, discussions on the indicator framework should be advanced in conjunction with deliberations on post-2030 development goals and targets so that the political decision on goals, targets, and indicators is informed by statistical and data experts.

The idea of a tiered structure of indicators to monitor progress toward international goals is not new. Progress toward the goals of the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is monitored with a combination of global and custom indicators. Countries submit Nationally Determined Contributions and set their own targets and indicators toward global goals, while global progress is monitored by, for example, global greenhouse gas emissions. Cross-country comparisons are made with the global core indicators, as well as the qualitative assessment of each country’s contributions to the goals26. This is based on the premise that it is neither feasible nor meaningful to compare countries using many global indicators because all countries are situated in different contexts and are not readily comparable.

The same combination of global and local goals and indicators can do for post-2030 international development monitoring what it does for tracking progress of the Paris Agreement. Optional global indicators and custom local indicators enable flexible, efficient, and meaningful monitoring. A streamlined set of core indicators facilitates reporting compliance and comparability of progress toward the common goals.