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On July 18, 2025, at the UN Headquarters in New York, Stakeholder Forum, in partnership with the Permanent Mission of the Dominican Republic to the UN and co-sponsored by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the International Science Council, held an in-person side event at the UN’s 2025 High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development.
Chaired by Stakeholder Forum Chair Louis Meuleman, with opening remarks from H.E. Luis Madera, Viceminister for Monitoring and Government Coordination of the Ministry of the Presidency of the Dominican Republic, and Mr. Juwang Zhu, Director, Division for Public Institutions and Digital Government, UN DESA.
During the interactive panel discussion moderated by SF Fellow David O’Connor that followed, its key conclusion was that without engagement of the entire spectrum of societal stakeholders, the science-policy interface will not effectively accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.
You can find a comprehensive account of the event and its key findings in an article by SF’s Louis Meuleman, Irena Zubcevic, Ingeborg Niestroy, and Dmytro Zlenko, published on 6 August 2025 on the IISD’s SDG Knowledge Hub.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- The 2025 UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development rightly focused on improving scientific evidence and science-policy relations for more effective and coherent implementation of the whole 2030 Agenda.
- However, the traditional science-policy concept excludes societal stakeholders, and hence misses out on non-scientific knowledge and innovative solutions, as well as on identifying societal questions.
- A side event at the 2025 HLPF hosted by Stakeholder Forum identified problems and solutions and called for tri-polar peer learning among science, policy, and society.
