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The purpose of this report is to propose a comprehensive and straightforward, yet su?ciently sophisticated methodology for monitoring the progress of the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals by the municipalities of Flanders, Belgium. The present report is a preliminary e?ort to encourage policymakers to take a regional focus and to implement bottom-up policies and initiatives supporting the Sustainable Development Goals.

A distinctive element of this report is that it uses a pre-existing framework, established by international organisations, but at a much more local scale. The methodology that we follow is typically used for monitoring countries or regions, but is in this case used to track the progress of over 300 cities in the province of Flanders. Our results show that performance di?ers across Flanders, with the east of the region achieving better SDG scores than the west. However, this pattern is relatively weak, and the di?erences between SDGs do not lend themselves to easy generalisations. While some provinces score better on some goals, for most of the other SDGs a real understanding of what is driving the results will require an in-depth, city-speci?c analysis. This is illustrated using Bruges as a case-study.

The Flanders cities SDG indexes are meant to guide policymakers to those areas where improvement is most needed while keeping a broader overview of the overall SDG performance. Furthermore, for each SDG and indicator, they point to those Flemish municipalities that can o?er up best-practices.