Sustainable Development Goals indicators: a methodological proposal for a fuzzy Super Index in the Mediterranean area

This paper provides a methodological proposal for the construction of a multidimensional index for sustainability assessment in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In particular, the paper proposes a new methodology to properly estimate the multidimensional nature of sustainable development and the SDGs introducing an innovative fuzzy approach. Specifically, we present a multidimensional methodology to build a Super Index to measure the performance of the Mediterranean countries towards the SDGs with a focus on the agro-food sustainability in line with the Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area (PRIMA). For this purpose, drawing on the fuzzy approach developed by Betti et al. (2015), a step by step procedure is provided in the paper: first the underlying dimensions of a set of selected indicators for the SDGs are identified through an exploratory factor analysis and then an innovative weighting methodology is applied for the aggregation of the indicators to calculate the countries’ scores for each dimension and finally the overall index.