Building on the success of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in September 2016, world leaders signed up to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). One year on, some good progress on the SDG 2030 Agenda has been made by Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states, businesses and non-government organizations: they have made assessments of what the 17 goals entail, made commitments, started testing the feasible policy options for prioritizing the implementation and confirmed their shared roles in delivering these ambitions.

But there has been a missing element in all these activities, needed to hold all the goals and actors together: systems thinking. Systems thinking identifies the interactions between different parts of a system and ensures they deliver more than the sum of their parts.

We are pretty good at setting goals such as the SDGs, the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) targets, the Paris Agreement, etc. and then working hard to achieve them. But for the SDGs to really shift ASEAN member states onto a sustainable development path, the countries need to seriously engage in joint thinking that goes deeper to address underlying causes.