The initiative aims to promote SDG policy coordination and coherence, by enabling decision-makers at all levels of governance and civil society stakeholders to visualize the long-term trajectory of their country's current development path; and by showing these impacts, devise and catalyze action on alternative coherent policies that help to achieve the SDGs. Millennium Institute has developed a system dynamics model - Threshold21 integrated SDG (iSDG) - that simulates the trends for the SDGs until 2030 for each of the SDG indicators under a business-as-usual scenario, and supports analysis of alternative policy scenarios.

MI has been developing a prototype model since 2014, which is now near completion. The model will be fully customized for a pilot country. This will be done through a multistep and multi-stakeholder process that engages with the country’s economic and political decision-makers and civil society stakeholders to collectively harness existing research and data on the country’s development indicators, and co-generate knowledge and robust evidence for analyzing the impacts, true cost, opportunities, and tradeoffs of policy interventions to achieve the SDGs. “Initiation” models for sixty countries that constitute 90% of the world’s population will also be developed. Issues that will be analyzed with the models include energy, water, land use, natural resources, health, poverty and inequality, agriculture production, food and nutrition security. Scenario design, simulation, and analysis will be done leading to the publication of a comprehensive global report on the likelihood to achieve the SDGs under different scenarios for the 60 countries.The eventual plan is to customize the iSDG model for all 193 UN Member States by 2020 in the mold of the pilot.

Transfer knowledge and capacity to understand and use the iSDG model to analyze and develop national policies aimed at achieving the SDGs will be provided to countries who adopt the model.

Millennium Institute. Partnerships aimed at bringing the initiative to scale is being developed with other actors, including the UN, bilateral aid organizations, governments and the private sector.