Meeting one sustainable development goal on human needs, social justice, or environmental limits can make it harder (or easier) to meet others. The extent to which countries succeed in reconciling these goals is context specific but depends largely on how we organize society and on what policy options and strategies we use. We present a model for sustainable development consisting of six indicators and assign thresholds that define a sustainable development space. The distances between the indicator values and their corresponding thresholds constitute the sustainable development gap. We then apply a cluster analysis technique to group 117 countries into six clusters that face similar challenges in closing this gap. Finally, we use illustrative spider web diagrams to assess the performance of these clusters at two points in time. We show that some countries have clearly been better than others at reconciling these goals, and many have reduced their sustainable development gap over time.

中文翻译：

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缩小可持续发展差距：目标相互作用的全球研究

实现一个关于人类需求、社会正义或环境限制的可持续发展目标可能会更难（或更容易）满足其他目标。各国成功协调这些目标的程度取决于具体情况，但在很大程度上取决于我们如何组织社会以及我们使用哪些政策选择和战略。我们提出了一个由六个指标组成的可持续发展模型，并指定了定义可持续发展空间的阈值。指标值与其对应阈值之间的距离构成了可持续发展差距。然后，我们应用集群分析技术将 117 个国家分为六个集群，这些集群在缩小这一差距方面面临类似的挑战。最后，我们使用说明性蜘蛛网图来评估这些集群在两个时间点的性能。