We published a letter on the government’s preparations aimed at achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We informed the House about the extent to which the Dutch central government has made preparations aimed at achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. In our view, the government has made a swift and well-organised start. However, we have identified a number of areas that require attention to ensure a lasting long-term impact.

We did not provide recommendations, we only identified a number of areas that require attention to ensure a lasting long-term impact.

Areas that require attention:

1. It is unclear to us to what extent sustainable development is part of the curriculum.
2. Working on the SDGs is a common challenge among the national government, local authorities and companies/other organizations.
3. The SDGs encompass virtually all policy areas and involve many actors. It is a big challenge to safeguard coherence between policy efforts and coordinate the actors at administrative level.
4. We addressed the opportunity to record certain SDG themes of significance to the Netherlands in the central government annual financial report.

This letter is the result of interviews with employees of several ministries, the national SDG coordinator and his team, Statistics Netherlands (CBS), PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and the SDG Charter (a Dutch organization that connects actors from diverse sectors to catalyze joint action contributing to the SDGs) and the analysis  of documents of the organizations mentioned above and international reports. As this was not a regular audit, this letter does not include any formal recommendations. The result of publishing this letter was attention for the topic and some developments of the areas that require attention.