Localizing SDGs to leverage policies through stakeholder engagement: a new research project in the Metropolitan City of Bologna, Italy

The Metropolitan City of Bologna, since its establishment, has been at the forefront of Sustainable Development (SD). Following the G7 Environment Ministerial meeting held in Bologna in 2017, the authority promoted the Bologna’s Chart for the Environment, which is rooted in the international principles of the UN 2030 Agenda, and has then set the environmental, economic and social sustainability as fundamental principles of the 2018 Metropolitan Strategic Plan 2.0. With the purposes to guide the future political line and the metropolitan development according to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a new research project aimed at creating a Metropolitan Agenda for SD 2.0 has been recently started. The novelty of the project, carried out by a multi-disciplinary working group, lies in the meaningful stakeholder engagement that is operated in each work phase. The construction of a local Agenda for Sustainable Development aims to provide a shared set of goals, integrated by tools and actions for the implementation, to all the territorial stakeholders belonging to different sectors. Hence, this paper intends to present the context of development, the experimented methodology, and its value of including public, private, and civil society entities both in the drafting progress and in the following stages. The project is not limited to a good practice of localization of the SDGs: it aims at offering a model to be scaled-up in other Metropolitan realities.