Page 87 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 2

STS461 Jukka H.
2. Methodology
National governments play a key role in the implementation of the 2030
Agenda. In Finland national implementation is guided by Government
Programme “Vision for Finland in 2025” and the Society’s commitment to
Sustainable Development “The Finland we Want by 2050” constitutes Finland’s
national interpretation of 2030 Agenda. These national goals are in line with
global SDGs. Finland has also established a national set of sustainable
development indicators to monitor progress towards SDGs although the data
compilation for these indicators is only to be started in late 2019. Finland has
already completed first VNR for HLPF in 2016 and second one is due in 2020.
(Prime Minister’s Office 2017) As Finland has been one of the forerunners in
implementing sustainable development principles, the Prime Minister’s Office
was one of the key actors behind starting the compilation of Finnish NPR on
global sustainable development.
The Finnish SDG development project for national compilation of SDG –
indicator data was carried out during 2018 at the National Statistical Office
(NSO), Statistics Finland. Project received the mandate, steering and financing
from the Prime Minister’s Office. The project employed two experts from NSO
and the allowance for the tasks was 150,000 euros. Despite funding from PMO
the experts worked independently following statistical codes of conduct and
ethics.
The project methodology involved eight distinctive steps: 1. systematic
mapping of indicators and data providers, 3. establishment of data provider
network, 4. compilation of data and relevant metadata, 5. data validation, 6.
translating indicator names into Finnish, 7. construction of national reporting
platform as well as 8. communication and data dissemination. Figure 2
presents these seven phases as a waterfall project model utilised in the
establishing NPR for SDG indicators.
The first task of development project included two mapping rounds of
possible indicator data producing institutions and organizations. Project
identified data providers that had already existing indicator data. Possible
providers that had data under development or had not calculated the relevant
indicator data, were excluded from the data providers’ list at this point. They
will be revisited later. As a result an existing data providers and contact
persons network was established. Next Statistics Finland delivered official
request for SDG indicator data and relevant metadata to these organisations
and contact persons. Replies for inquiry resulted not only official statistics data
but also much data that had to be validated by Statistics Finland. This
validation was quite general at this stage, but it included the assessments of
relevance and correctness of data as well as assessments of methodological
soundness.

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