The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognized the interconnectedness of the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of sustainable development and the need for integrated solutions. Yet, progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been uneven and beset with tradeoffs, and the pursuit of sustainable development has been pursued through largely siloed rather than systems approaches. The present research argues that recentering a systems approach to sustainable development at the community level rather than wider spatial scales may present useful opportunities to both understand and pursue the SDGs in more integrated and locally meaningful ways, which this paper explores through the lens of peace (SDG 16) and health (SDG 3).
While the standalone peace and health SDGs are ambitious, they are measured by targets and indicators that represent narrow negative definitions of these domains aligning with common conceptualizations of peace and health as absences of conflict and disease/infirmity, respectively. Notions of positive peace and positive health expand understandings to encompass the presence of positive features that are normatively rather than objectively or universally defined and which may overlap conceptually. For example, positive peace and positive health may share local and place-based understandings and processes related to social interconnectedness, living in harmony with the natural environment, and the freedom to live in accordance with meaningful values. Moreover, positive peace and positive health may be interdependent and lend themselves to encompassing and supporting other SDGs, such as reducing inequalities (SDGs 5 and 10) and using resources in ecologically sound ways (SDGs 6, 12, 13, and 15).
The paper discusses opportunities and challenges for systems approaches to positive peace and positive health for sustainable development at the community level, including the potential for synergies and tradeoffs, collective action benefits and problems, and issues related to data collection and measurement covering qualitative and quantitative data. This paper concludes that communities may be the most appropriate and effective scale of analysis and action in cultivating sustainable development, especially when seeking a systems approach involving interconnectedness, the breaking down of silos, and combining multiple time and space scales. In this way, communities are afforded both the agency and partnership opportunities to define, measure, and pursue their own locally meaningful goals in the context of social and environmental changes and challenges.
