Making governments act on Sustainable Development Goals: The case of critical peer discourse in poverty relief

There are numerous calls to revise the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to make them more attainable, but how governments can achieve this remains debated. Suggestions for SDG implementation often focus on enhanced governance models, with civil society holding governments accountable for sustainability commitments. This paper, through the lens of poverty relief via SDG1 and SDG2, advocates for a practice-oriented approach that enables deprived communities to leverage the SDGs for political gain. We argue that the poor can hold governments accountable through critical peer discourse, which refers to the exchange of critical views within communities about public policy. While critical peer discourse often generates a passive political space with limited influence on government politics, it can become a space of governmental accountability when customized around SDG1 and SDG2 indicators. To this end, a roadmap for organizing critical peer discourse is developed through controlling governmental data and informal language games with communities.