With the adoption of 2030 Agenda, on September 25th 2015 by the heads of states of 193 countries under the aegis of United Nation’s General Assembly (UNGA), attention turned to the national level, where our governments at federal and provincial levels, working with a range of stakeholders, and struggling to establish a framework for implementation that identifies a realistic set of locally appropriate targets and indicators. In this context, it is much appreciative that government has already commenced the process of implementation of SDGs by approving National Framework for SDGs targets and indicators, notifying Parliamentary Task Forces on SDGs to oversight the implementation of national priority framework, establishing SDGs Units at Planning Commission of Pakistan and at P & D Departments at Provincial headquarters. However, most of the civil society, academics, private sector, local governments and other related stakeholders were unaware of these efforts. AwazCDS/Pakistan Development Alliance has carried out a quick mapping/ assessment on the current status of SDGs implementation at national and provincial level that identifies the accomplishments, opportunities, challenges and gaps to date. In order to highlight and share the key findings of the assessment, a series of policy to action forums were organized at national and provincial levels.

The report shares the diverse opinion of people and related stakeholders regarding the implementation of SDGs. Some views are much critical that includes the lack of ownership by the governments, inefficiencies and the dominance of non-democratic forces over strategic level decisions making negatively affected the implementation of SDGs agenda. Furthermore, unreliable data used as baselines weakened the legitimacy of the proposed framework and SDGs implementation process.

The report also shares more philosophical nature of criticism of the people regarding the approach of the SDGs and termed them quite ambitious in nature. These critics argued that human development goals should have been determined in respect of basic inalienable human rights instead of current top-down development approach.