The SLPF project has entered its dissemination phase. After months of joint work with partner cities, the project is now sharing its main outputs, discoveries, and practical lessons with a wider circle of European municipalities. Events in Tallinn, Amsterdam, and Paris have opened this exchange. The reflections below come from the Paris event, where cities discussed one central question: how can SDG budgeting move from reporting to real decision-making?
The answer from Paris was clear: cities do not need more abstract commitments. They need tools that help them make better choices when money is limited, political priorities compete, and climate and social pressures are growing.
Discussion in a nutshell
The meeting brought together experiences from cities including Paris, Hamburg, Barcelona, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, and others. Each city is approaching SDG budgeting from a different starting point.
Paris is working on how to move beyond green budget reporting and use sustainability criteria to compare investment projects. The city is exploring simple visual tools, such as favourable or unfavourable scoring and radar charts, to support political decisions between competing projects.
Hamburg presented a highly developed performance-based budgeting system, with hundreds of product groups, objectives, and KPIs already linked to the SDGs. Yet even there, the discussion showed that linking indicators to SDGs is only the beginning. A KPI may be technically linked to an SDG, but that does not mean it truly measures impact.
Barcelona offered a more integrated picture of cross-cutting budget analysis. Climate, gender, childhood, and SDG perspectives are all being applied to the budget, but this creates a new problem: different methodologies do not always align neatly. The city’s challenge is not a lack of tools, but the difficulty of bringing them together into one coherent framework.
Bordeaux and French experts focused strongly on climate investment planning. Their argument was that green budgeting should not be the final destination. It is a snapshot. The next step is to use climate objectives, physical trajectories, and investment needs to shape multi-year investment plans from the beginning.
The event also introduced a proposed five-step framework for SDG budgeting developed by KDZ. These steps range from basic strategic alignment with SDGs, to budget tagging, trade-off assessment, fully integrated performance budgeting, and finally a more mature “learning organization” model that includes wider stakeholders and public entities.
Insight 1: Tagging is useful, but it does not make decisions
One of the most important insights was that budget tagging can reveal patterns, but it does not automatically redirect money.
Several participants questioned whether tagging exercises actually change decisions. The answer seemed to be: sometimes, but rarely in a mechanical way. A red or unfavourable tag does not automatically cancel a project. Instead, it starts a conversation.
That may sound modest, but it matters. One example concerned the renewal of diesel waste collection trucks. When the climate budget showed an increase in unfavourable expenditure, it triggered scrutiny. The city did not immediately replace every truck with an electric alternative, but it did ask a more basic question: do we actually need this many trucks? The result was not just a climate discussion, but a value-for-money discussion. This is where SDG budgeting becomes powerful. Its value may not be in producing a perfect formula. Its value lies in making hidden trade-offs visible.
Insight 2: The best sustainability tool may be a better political conversation
A recurring theme was the tension between technical sophistication and political usefulness.
Some cities have thousands of indicators. Others are trying to reduce complexity so that elected officials can actually use the information. The Paris discussion captured this tension well. A perfect model that measures every SDG impact in detail may be too complex to influence real budget negotiations. A simpler tool may be less precise, but more useful if it helps politicians ask better questions.
The goal, then, is not to replace politics with indicators. It is to improve the quality of political choice.
This is especially important when projects cannot be judged by one criterion alone. A school renovation may involve accessibility, energy efficiency, digital infrastructure, gender-sensitive design, and social inclusion. The question is not whether each goal matters. The question is how to combine them when money is limited.
Insight 3: Climate adaptation may be the most politically resilient entry point
Several speakers noted that climate mitigation can be politically divisive. Adaptation, however, may offer broader support.
Heatwaves, floods, water stress, and coastal erosion are no longer abstract future risks. They are local realities. Because adaptation speaks directly to daily life, public health, and local resilience, it can create a wider political coalition.
This point is particularly important in a context of climate backlash. If some politicians or citizens are less motivated by long-term emissions targets, they may still care about protecting schools from heat, reducing flood damage, or ensuring public spaces remain liveable. Adaptation may therefore act as a gateway: it brings people into the sustainability conversation through concrete local problems.
Insight 4: Cities need to know the gap, not just the current score
Green budgeting tells a city where it stands. Climate investment planning asks where the city needs to go.
This distinction was one of the most interesting parts of the exchange. A green budget can classify expenditure as favourable, neutral, or unfavourable. But it does not necessarily answer the bigger question: how much investment is needed to meet climate objectives?
The French climate investment planning approach starts from physical targets. For example, how many buildings need to be renovated? How many kilometres of infrastructure are required? What level of investment does that imply? By multiplying physical trajectories by unit costs, cities can estimate the investment gap.
This changes the political conversation. Instead of simply saying “we are spending this much,” a city can say: “to meet our target, we would need this much; with the current plan, we are covering half, or three quarters, or only a small part of the gap.”
That creates a clearer basis for decision-making.
Insight 5: Not every solution requires more money
Although much of the discussion focused on investment, several participants warned against reducing sustainability to spending.
Some objectives can be pursued through regulation, operational choices, behavioural change, or better use of existing assets. Restricting private cars in certain areas, saving electricity in social welfare facilities, or redesigning operational practices may reduce emissions without requiring major capital expenditure.
This is a crucial reminder. Performance budgeting was originally about finding the most effective and efficient way to achieve objectives. If cities focus only on investment, they may overlook cheaper or more creative solutions.
The sustainability question should therefore not be: “How much more money do we need?” It should be: “What combination of investment, regulation, management, and behavioural change will best achieve the goal?”
Insight 6: Comparability remains a major challenge
The discussion on KPIs showed how difficult it is to compare cities.
Even when cities use indicators under the same SDG, they often measure slightly different things. One city may track trees planted in empty tree pits; another may count total trees planted; another may measure green surface area. These are related, but not identical.
This matters because SDG budgeting often promises benchmarking. In practice, true benchmarking is hard unless indicators, data sources, accounting systems, and definitions are aligned.
The lesson is not that comparison is impossible. Rather, cities should be careful about what they compare. Financial indicators may be somewhat easier to standardize, but non-financial sustainability indicators remain highly context-specific.
Insight 7: The next frontier is integration
The strongest impression from the meeting is that cities are not short of tools. They have many tools: climate annexes, SDG tags, gender budgeting, child-focused analysis, participatory budgeting, investment plans, performance indicators, and financial sustainability KPIs.
The next frontier is integration.
Cities need systems that connect strategic goals, budget choices, operational data, political priorities, and long-term investment needs. They also need to avoid overwhelming decision-makers with too much information. The future of SDG budgeting will probably not be one universal model. It will be a set of adaptable approaches that cities can use depending on their maturity, institutional structure, political context, and data capacity.
Conclusion: SDG budgeting is becoming less about reporting and more about governing
The Paris exchange showed that SDG budgeting is maturing. The early phase was about visibility: making sustainability visible in the budget. The next phase is about choice: using sustainability information to shape priorities, manage trade-offs, and defend long-term investment.
The most important lesson may be that SDG budgeting does not remove politics from budgeting. It makes politics more explicit.
It shows where money supports climate action, where it undermines it, where social and environmental goals reinforce one another, and where difficult choices remain. In that sense, the real achievement of SDG budgeting is not a better annex, a better chart, or a better KPI.
It is a better conversation about the future of the city.
The SLPF project is funded by the European Union through the Technical Support Instrument and is implemented by KDZ - Centre for Public Administration Research, Expertise France and I4CE - Institut de l'économie pour le climat / Institute for Climate Economics , in cooperation with the European Commission's SG REFORM.
More soon at www.slpf.eu.
