Policy and Political Challenges for a Better World the United States and China Pathways Towards the 2030 Agenda

This paper aims at characterizing and comparing the path of sustainable development within tStates and China at the subnational level. This is done by introducing an internationally comparable indicator of Integrated Sustainable Development embracing the integrated nature of the SDGs and penalizing the heterogeneity of achievements. The Index is computed at both the national and subnational level. Along with convergence and cluster analyses, this allows answering four questions: 1) are the United States and China moving towards a sustainable development agenda and achieving the SDGs? 2) are the current achievements uniformly distributed within the two countries? 3) are states/provinces converging towards a more uniform level of sustainable development? 4) do the existing differences and analogies between states and provinces give rise to common clusters across the two countries? The answers to these questions are presented and discussed, leading to one robust conclusion: while the United States can claim a better positioning in the national and subnational rankings of sustainable development, China exhibits a more balanced sustainable development path in terms of both SDGs achievement combination and spatial distribution. Nonetheless, both countries are still characterized by deep territorial disparities and scarce achievements of Planet-related Goals. Policy recommendations are then discussed accordingly