Building on the Millennium Development Goals, the UN Sustainable Development Goals are the cornerstone of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, billed by the UN as “An Agenda of unprecedented scope and significance.” The seventeen ambitious goals, which are intended to be reached by 2030, are conceived as integrated, indivisible, and as balancing the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. They are organized around five core pillars:
? People: ending poverty and hunger and ensuring that all human beings can lead fulfilling lives in a healthy and dignified environment.
? Planet: protecting the environment while ensuring sustainable use and management of natural resources.
? Prosperity: ensuring environmentally sustainable economic growth, mutual prosperity, and decent work for all.
? Peace: building societies that are peaceful, just, and inclusive, and in which human rights and gender equality are respected.
? Partnership: strengthening global solidarity to address inequalities within and between countries, by focusing on the needs of the most vulnerable.
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This Research Topic addresses the ninth Sustainable Development Goal, which is to “Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.” Progress toward this goal is measured by a number of individual targets and indicators.
As highlighted in the UN’s most recent SDG progress report, the manufacturing sector, which had already seen the slowest year-on-year growth rate since 2012, was hit especially hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. This led to a global drop in manufacturing production of 8.4 per cent in 2020. Alongside job losses and declining income for workers, the pandemic has significantly disrupted global supply chains and severely affected small-scale industries. Less technology-intensive industries have also taken longer to recover than medium and high-technology industries, such as the pharmaceutical, computer, electronics and automotive sectors.
The UN nonetheless notes that the crisis offers the opportunity to foster industrialization and improve the global distribution of groundbreaking technologies. In emerging from the pandemic, it highlights key areas of focus, including continuing to expand mobile broadband networks, increasing R&D investment, and improving rural road connectivity.
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This Research Topic will address the ninth Sustainable Development Goal from a sociological-specific perspective.
Given the global setbacks to the industrial and transport sectors resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s edition of the Research Topic will focus particularly on the challenges and complexities of industrial development in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.
This Research Topic welcomes papers that will provide both theoretical and empirical findings. Potential issues include, but are not limited to:
• Social and cultural aspects of technology transfer and global diffusion of groundbreaking technologies.
• Supply chains and the global economy: threats and opportunities for specific sectors.
• Redesign of the transport systems, including travel, trade, logistics, and freight distribution.
• Multi-level, cross-sectoral, and multi-sectoral cooperation of various stakeholders, including public, private, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and non-formal entities.
• Regional and local bottom-up responses, their scalability, feedbacks from environmental change, degrowth, and community resilience.
• The advances in the access to digital infrastructures as well as information and communications technologies (ICTs).
• The new ideas and approaches relevant for the fields of technological policy, industrial policy, and innovative policy.
• National and international industrial policies and innovation policies in response to global health challenges.
• Planning, management, governance, and evaluation of governmental interventions including, for example, economic policy, agricultural and food policy, industrial policy, technology policy, and innovative policy.
• Industrialization, resilient infrastructure, innovation, and research and development investments in the law and public policies related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Building on the Millennium Development Goals, the UN Sustainable Development Goals are the cornerstone of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, billed by the UN as “An Agenda of unprecedented scope and significance.” The seventeen ambitious goals, which are intended to be reached by 2030, are conceived as integrated, indivisible, and as balancing the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. They are organized around five core pillars:
? People: ending poverty and hunger and ensuring that all human beings can lead fulfilling lives in a healthy and dignified environment.
? Planet: protecting the environment while ensuring sustainable use and management of natural resources.
? Prosperity: ensuring environmentally sustainable economic growth, mutual prosperity, and decent work for all.
? Peace: building societies that are peaceful, just, and inclusive, and in which human rights and gender equality are respected.
? Partnership: strengthening global solidarity to address inequalities within and between countries, by focusing on the needs of the most vulnerable.
*
This Research Topic addresses the ninth Sustainable Development Goal, which is to “Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.” Progress toward this goal is measured by a number of individual targets and indicators.
As highlighted in the UN’s most recent SDG progress report, the manufacturing sector, which had already seen the slowest year-on-year growth rate since 2012, was hit especially hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. This led to a global drop in manufacturing production of 8.4 per cent in 2020. Alongside job losses and declining income for workers, the pandemic has significantly disrupted global supply chains and severely affected small-scale industries. Less technology-intensive industries have also taken longer to recover than medium and high-technology industries, such as the pharmaceutical, computer, electronics and automotive sectors.
The UN nonetheless notes that the crisis offers the opportunity to foster industrialization and improve the global distribution of groundbreaking technologies. In emerging from the pandemic, it highlights key areas of focus, including continuing to expand mobile broadband networks, increasing R&D investment, and improving rural road connectivity.
*
This Research Topic will address the ninth Sustainable Development Goal from a sociological-specific perspective.
Given the global setbacks to the industrial and transport sectors resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s edition of the Research Topic will focus particularly on the challenges and complexities of industrial development in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.
This Research Topic welcomes papers that will provide both theoretical and empirical findings. Potential issues include, but are not limited to:
• Social and cultural aspects of technology transfer and global diffusion of groundbreaking technologies.
• Supply chains and the global economy: threats and opportunities for specific sectors.
• Redesign of the transport systems, including travel, trade, logistics, and freight distribution.
• Multi-level, cross-sectoral, and multi-sectoral cooperation of various stakeholders, including public, private, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and non-formal entities.
• Regional and local bottom-up responses, their scalability, feedbacks from environmental change, degrowth, and community resilience.
• The advances in the access to digital infrastructures as well as information and communications technologies (ICTs).
• The new ideas and approaches relevant for the fields of technological policy, industrial policy, and innovative policy.
• National and international industrial policies and innovation policies in response to global health challenges.
• Planning, management, governance, and evaluation of governmental interventions including, for example, economic policy, agricultural and food policy, industrial policy, technology policy, and innovative policy.
• Industrialization, resilient infrastructure, innovation, and research and development investments in the law and public policies related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
