What do British, American, German and French people know about the Sustainable Development Goals?

Unsurprisingly, there is a lack of knowledge and understanding of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a framework adopted in 2015 by 193 countries. Only a small minority of people seem to have heard of the SDGs.

When we look at the responses collected in France, Germany, the UK and the USA, only a minority of respondents (between 8% and 12%) claim to have already heard of it "while knowing what it is". Actually, this percentage has remained relatively stable over the survey waves since 2019.

The proportion of those who admit not knowing at all what the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are, ranges from 51% among the French to 68% among the British. If we look at the distribution of percentages across the four possible answers, it’s in the UK that knowledge of the SDGs seems to be the least spontaneous.

Actually, among respondents who claim to "know what the SDGs are without really knowing what they are", the French are far more numerous than their German, British or American counterparts. On closer examination, there are wide fluctuations among the answers chosen, i.e. between those who choose the intermediate answer "I know but I don’t know", those who answer "no" with certainty, and those who simply "don’t know" how to answer this question.

Behind these disparities lie the influence of national public policies about environment, the degree of awareness of sustainable development in each country, and the semantic dimension attached to the expression "sustainable development", which is probably used with different frequency in different languages and countries. For example, "sustainable development" is particularly polysemous in French. The popularization of this concept, initiated at the Rio Conference in 1992, is illustrated in France by the adoption of public policies using the concept of "sustainable development", newspaper columns dedicated to the topic, the appropriation of this concern and expression in corporate communications, even in the titles of ministries.

What the majority of French people understand by Sustainable Development Goals undoubtedly refers in part to "sustainable development" in its ecological and environmental dimension. In previous waves of surveys, we noted that when the same populations were questioned without any reference to the United Nations in the phrasing of the question, awareness of the SDGs was suddenly much higher in France. This suggested that some respondents tended to claim to know about "sustainable development" without properly answering the question on knowledge of the SDGs.

QUESTIONS ASKED IN FRANCE IN 2018 TO COMPARE THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFERENCE TO THE "UNITED NATIONS"

This data comes from our survey conducted by the YouGov Institute and piloted by the research team at University College London and the University of Birmingham as part of the project Development Engagement Lab project and the Aid Attitudes Tracker which measure the evolution of opinions and behaviors on issues of international solidarity in four countries.