Enayat A. Moallemi, Seyed Hossein Hosseini, Sibel Eker, Lei Gao, Edoardo Bertone, Katrina Szetey, Brett A. Bryan

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is contingent on managing complex interactions that create synergies and trade-offs between different goals. Given the importance of interactions, it is necessary to understand the system mechanisms underpinning them to provide insight into their non-linear behaviours such as side-effects, delay, and acceleration. Prominent methods of SDG analysis that focus on sector-specific modelling or data-driven statistical correlation are insufficient for presenting an integrated view of interactions among many goals. These methods are also often too technically complex or heavily data-driven to provide decision-makers with a simple practical tool and easily actionable and understandable results. To address this gap, we introduce a systems approach for analysing the SDGs that generalises a number of recurring interactions with unique structures and behaviours termed archetypes. We present eight interaction archetypes as thinking aids to conceptualise and analyse some of the important synergies and trade-offs, supported by several empirical studies related to the SDGs (e.g., poverty, food, well-being, water, energy, housing, climate, land-use). We also discuss how this approach can be operationalised in practice and what opportunities and challenges are ahead. Interaction archetype analysis advances sustainability science by giving researchers and policy-makers a diagnostic tool to identify fundamental mechanisms of barriers or policy resistance to SDG achievement, a comparative tool that can enhance knowledge transfer about the SDGs between different cases which share similar causal characteristics in a more coordinated way, and a prospective tool to design synergistic and transformational solutions for sustainable development.