A cluster-based evaluation through four theoretical lenses

Ten years after their introduction, global progress toward achieving the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) remains uneven (Zarghami, 2025). While some countries have made notable strides on several targets, others have lagged behind. Moreover, disparities exist even within individual countries. Many countries have advanced on certain goals but continue to face significant challenges in meeting others. To monitor this progress, the United Nations (UN) conducts regular reviews and publishes annual reports that track global trends from the 2015 baseline to the most recent available data (United Nations, 2024).

Building on these reports, academic literature has extensively examined progress toward the SDG targets from various perspectives. Scholars have evaluated overall country performance in achieving all 17 goals (Subramaniam et al., 2023), analyzed specific goals or subsets of these goals (Moyer and Hedden, 2020), explored regional trends (Jeyacheya and Hampton, 2020), and created country groupings based on patterns of SDG achievement (Jena and Basel, 2025). Collectively, these studies provide valuable insights into both the successes and shortcomings of global sustainable development efforts. They also emphasize the insufficiency of current efforts to meet the goals (Sachs et al., 2023) and propose strategies to accelerate progress. Despite these valuable contributions, a fundamental gap persists in the literature: there remains insufficient theoretical understanding of the underlying drivers that explain why countries exhibit distinct patterns of progress across the SDGs (Bali Swain and Yang-Wallentin, 2020; Cling and Delecourt, 2022). While existing research has successfully documented what is happening in terms of SDG performance trends and correlations, it has yet to adequately explain why these patterns emerge and how specific contextual factors systematically influence countries’ abilities to achieve sustainable development outcomes.

This theoretical deficit represents a critical gap in the literature, as strategies to accelerate SDG progress may be unreliable without a clear understanding of the specific drivers and mechanisms shaping outcomes across countries and regions. The cascading crises of recent years—from pandemic-related failures in social protection systems to climate extremes and cost-of-living pressures—have highlighted that fragmented, short-term approaches to sustainable development are insufficient for addressing the complex, interconnected challenges nations face. As the global community enters the final third of the SDG journey, the urgent need for evidence-based and contextually informed strategies becomes crucial to prevent further widening of global development divides (Global Sustainable Development Report, 2023). As Foy et al. (2011, p. 454) note, theoretical frameworks “provide a basis or vocabulary with which to describe the key features of targeted behaviours, contexts and interventions.” Such frameworks help explain country or region-specific characteristics—such as innovation capacity, institutional inertia, historical inequalities, and dependence on resource-based revenues—that shape progress toward the SDGs. A deeper understanding of these contextual factors enables more tailored and effective pathways for intervention.

To address this gap, the paper draws on recent data from the Sustainable Development Goals Report 2024; United Nations (2024), which provides SDG achievement scores for 167 countries across all 17 goals. It then employs cluster analysis to group countries based on shared patterns in their SDG performance, revealing commonalities and differences in their progress toward sustainable development. After clustering, the paper applies four theoretical frameworks—Schumpeterian innovation theory, degrowth theory, postcolonial theory, and rentier state theory—to interpret the underlying drivers of each cluster. These theoretical frameworks are chosen for their relevance to the economic, historical, and innovation profiles of each group. While the analysis does not claim to offer a definitive theoretical explanation of SDG performance, it illustrates how multiple perspectives can enhance the understanding of the complex and context-dependent dynamics involved. This approach offers a theoretically informed interpretation of why different groups of countries perform as they do, leading to the development of four propositions that guide how these groups can enhance their sustainable development efforts.