Sustainable Development Report 2022 was the first edition of the report that includes the assessment of the government’s SDG effort. To create the assessment, UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network asked all of its national chapter’s host to collaborate in gathering data on the government SDG’s effort. The output of the collaboration is published in the Sustainable Development Report 2022. Thammasat University, by the SDG Move under the Faculty of Economics, is the national host of SDSN Thailand and was collaborating in the data collection process to produce this result.
National Government Efforts to implement the SDGs Source: Sustainable Development Report 2022, page 38. https://s3.amazonaws.com/sustainabledevelopment.report/2022/2022-sustainable-development-report.pdf
Thailand was classified as a country with moderate SDG commitment. While Thailand has its SDG strategy, the Prime Minister provides statements supporting the SDGs, and an organization (NESDC) is assigned to lead the implementation, it still missed SDGs in the national budget and also lacked the number of national SDG indicators. These issues have improved in the 2023 survey.
Source: Sustainable Development Report 2022, page 48. https://s3.amazonaws.com/sustainabledevelopment.report/2022/2022-sustainable-development-report.pdf
In 2022, Thammasat University initiated and participated in at least two cross-sectoral dialogues specifically on the SDGs.
Thailand Sustainable Development Forum: July 26, 2022
The first event was in Thailand Sustainable Development Forum 2022. SDG Move, Thammasat University was one of the organizers of the event, along with International Health Policy Foundation and SDSN Thailand. The event was held on July 26, 2022 at Pullman King Power Hotel, Bangkok. This event was co-organized, co-hosted and partnered by several academic institutions and international organizations, such as UNDP, World Bank and WHO. It focused on reframing SDGs into more integrated transformation themes, and creating multi-stakeholder platform to explore the underlying driving factors for SDG implementations, using a conceptual framework developed by SDG Move and IHPP, called “System Diagnostic Framework for SDG Implementation”.
The forum consists of several parts. The keynote speeches were given by the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, and the President of the National Social and Economic Development Council. The following session was a public forum where public, political, and civil society stakeholders participated. The panellists include the director of the National Institute for Child and Family Department, Mahidol University; the director of Think Forward Center under the Move Forward Party; the deputy director of PMU-B, a research granting agency; the president of the sub-committee on Baan Munkong project and land management, a representative from CSO sector; and secretariate of Bio-Thai Foundation, an NGO.
You can see the quotes and photos from the event in the links below.
2. SDG Move’s Public Seminar on “From SDG washing to SDG enabling”: September 22, 2022
This public seminar was hosted by SDG Move, Thammasat University, and joined by panellists from academic institutions, a social enterprise and a civil society organization, on September 24, 2022, to discuss one of the major concerns on SDGs, the “SDG Washing”. The panellists include the following organizations.
The Managing Director of Sal Forest co,ltd.;
The director of the Northen Development Foundation, an NGO;
The founder of Hand Social Enterprise, a social enterprise tackling the corruption problem.
The panel addressed several examples of SDG washing and tried to identify the causes of such actions. The SDG washing is not only prevalent in the private sector but also in the public sector. A few of them, however, tried to SDG wash. The others are rather unaware of how to implement the SDGs properly. The panel proposed that to avoid the allegation, an organization needs to prioritize an act to reduce harmful consequences from their actions before any other CSR activities.
