Defused Boundary Objects? Challenges in the Territorialization of Agenda 2030 Indicators in the Metropolitan City of Milan

Agenda 2030, approved by the United Nations in 2015, was designed as a system of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to provide tools to guide countries toward implementing coordinated and effective sustainability policies. To fully unfold its potential to inform the practices of these diverse actors, however, the SDGs are translated into a set of monitoring indicators, which provide measurable targets to be achieved by 2030 and benchmarks to assess the progress of implemented actions. As observed by many authors, this system of indicators can be regarded as a boundary object, allowing for coordination and collaboration between different actors at different scales without previous negotiation of consensus. From an implementation perspective, however, this entails adapting indicators to local contexts to retain applicability. This effort brings back the need for consensus amongst national, regional, provincial and local institutions to establish common reference indicators and organic data collection policies. Our aim is to understand the problematic nature of the translation processes driving the territorialization of A2030 goals and metrics in the Metropolitan City of Milan, focusing in particular on SDG 11. We trace key difficulties in this process to the heterogeneous nature of indicators as boundary objects, requiring involved actors to reach a consensus on their sociological significance (indicators should reflect the specificities of local contexts), on their political implications (with SDG indicators driving actors to shape their policies accordingly, while competing with different systems of measurement connected to alternative sustainability plans), on their organizational requirements (being different sets of data more easily and economically gathered by some institutions than by others), and on their technical features (requiring data collection and integration as a common standard for communication).