From SDG alignment to SDG-ready public administration: institutional capacity, collaborative governance, and trust in Portuguese sustainability governance

Abstract

The 2030 Agenda has transformed sustainability from a planning and reporting agenda into a demanding public-administration challenge. Governments are expected not only to align policies with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but also to coordinate across administrative silos, manage goal interactions and trade-offs, support local implementation, engage stakeholders, monitor progress, and sustain public trust in long-term transformation. This article asks under what conditions Portuguese sustainability governance can move from formal SDG alignment to transformative implementation. The article develops a theory-derived framework centred on five governance requirements: policy coherence, horizontal coordination, vertical coordination, collaborative participation and publicvalue protection, and monitoring-driven learning. Empirically, it adopts a theory-guided diagnostic case-study design combining a structured synthesis of secondary evidence on Portuguese SDG governance with comparative survey analysis using European Social Survey Round 11 (ESS-11) data. The survey component assesses institutional trust, democratic legitimacy, social trust, civic participation, and an author-constructed publicvalue/sustainability orientation index. The Portuguese case shows the development of relevant instruments for strategic planning, SDG reporting, coordination, and local mobilisation, but also reveals uneven implementation capacity across the five governance requirements. Weighted descriptive estimates from ESS-11 indicate that Portugal is close to the ESS-11 average in institutional trust and democratic legitimacy, lower in social trust and civic participation, and higher in the public-value/sustainability orientation index. These descriptive differences are not interpreted as statistically significant unless supported by inferential testing. The findings suggest that effective SDG implementation depends less on the proliferation of first-generation SDG planning and reporting instruments than on the institutional and social capacity to translate formal alignment into coordinated, accountable, participatory, learningoriented, and trusted administrative practice. The Portuguese case therefore illustrates a broader transition from SDG-aligned to SDG-ready public administration, in which transformative implementation depends on governance capacity as much as on formal commitment to the 2030 Agenda.