Agenda 2030 in West Sweden - a collaborative forum for partnerships for implementation of the goals

#SDGAction42826

Description

Intro

For 20 years, the GAME network has served as a neutral arena that brings together triple helix in West Sweden to stimulate collaboration and innovations on sustainable development. The new collaborative forum of the network – Agenda 2030 in West Sweden – aims to engage and stimulate partnerships for implementation of the goals. The forum has a holistic focus that enables exchange of knowledge and experience about all the goals and how they are interrelated, with goal 17 as the entrance to work with the whole agenda. Through the forum, actors get a platform to think globally, by acting locally.

Objective of the practice

We believe that cooperation that involves different sectors and actors both in problem formulation and implementation is particularly important for managing the agenda's intertwined goals. It is therefore crucial with platforms where the different sectors and actors can meet. The objective of the collaborative forum is to provide opportunities for actors from different sectors to meet focusing on various themes. The forum is working with the whole agenda, in order to not cherry-pick any goal. But goal 17 is of particular importance to the forum because we see it as a method to implement all the other goals. Our method is to provide meeting spaces for actors where they can discuss different global and local challenges and solutions on a neutral arena. Many of the most pressing challenges today cannot be solved in silos why it is so important for actors to meet. The aim is to enable for the actors to move closer to each other to jointly formulate the challenges and form partnerships for solutions. In our work we are constantly facing the challenge of how to move faster on the scale from “networking to co-creation” in order to actually formulate collaboration and partnerships. We believe that one way to overcome these difficulties is to continue doing what we are already doing – to provide meeting spaces for triple helix to get to know each other through the goals.

Partners

Financial Board: Chalmers University of Technology, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg Centre for Sustainable Development (GMV), The University of Borås, IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, Region Västra Götaland, County Administrative Board of Västra Götaland. Advisory Board: Ramböll Sverige AB, Essity, KappAhl, Innovatum AB, Business Region Göteborg, Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management, CSR Västsverige, Coompanion. In addition to these two permanent councils, working groups are formed as needed. The forum is an open network: anyone interested can participate in meetings, but the main target group is the working professional.

Implementation of the Project/Activity

Operating areas: Forum meetings and workshops, Annual conference, Communication and external monitoring, In-depth networking. Process for the forum meetings and workshops in order to increase the possibility for partnerships to take place: Step 1: Forum meeting: Discussion and workshop about challenge-driven solutions made possible by broad collaboration. Step 2: Possible follow-up workshop. Those who are interested in developing projects discuss further. Step 3: Project development GAME supports project owners with coordination and communication when needed and/or when opportunity is given. For monitoring mechanisms, we have set up a set of goals and plans of how to check if we reach them. We also have evaluations of each event we organize.

Results/Outputs/Impacts

We are noticing an increased interest of working with us, for example that people are contacting us because they want to be involved in organizing forum meetings.

Enabling factors and constraints

Our activities are enabled by the organizations financing us, otherwise we would not be able to operate. But another crucial enabler is the strong interest and will among different organizations in West Sweden to learn more and actually be able to contribute. Also an understanding of the reality that many of our biggest challenges cannot be solved in silos. This enables our activities because people are actually interested in contributing from their field!

Sustainability and replicability

We are planning to engage more actors, both in the financial board but also in the open network, in order to spread the knowledge about Agenda 2030 but also to engage more actors in contributing with their perspective. We are researching if there are other networks working in a similar way.

Other sources of information

http://www.gamenetwork.se https://twitter.com/2030Vast https://www.linkedin.com/company/agenda2030vast/

SDGS & Targets