The United Nations' (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are a recognised metric for measuring environmental, economic, and societal progress. However, national or multinational-level analyses are more prevalent than sub-national types. The performance of 14 SDGs for 56 Indian cities (grouped into 6 regions) with the available 77 indicators (2020–2021) have been analysed. Pearson’s correlation, hierarchical clustering, data envelopment analysis, Theil index, etc. were used to infer existing status, interactions, inequality, efficiency, and interrelationships. Finally, policy suggestions have been offered coupled with limitations to mitigate the drawbacks of the Indian city SDG framework. The findings reveal the asynchronous nature of the SDGs. 18% of Indian cities register a poor track record of converting environmental performance into socioeconomic prosperity, while 55% of cities are lagging in performance compared to their respective states. Significant inequality exists among cities in various regions towards achieving the SDGs. The environment is adversely affected in a race to be economically powerful. So, mainstreaming the environment into development planning is urgently warranted.

The fulfilment of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, concerning water and sanitation, is critical in itself and also conditional for the other 16 SDGs being met. The purpose of this study was to understand the scientific research trajectories, spatiotemporal development, scientific collaboration, ongoing research themes, and gaps related to SDG 6. We propose a coupling of bibliometric and text mining methods in this work, to statistically portray the impact of water research on the accomplishment of SDG 6. Through the Web of Science database, we focused on a single UN SDG goal (i.e., six related publications that were current (2015–2021)). The study was performed on the chosen 289 publications. With the analysis of Keywords Plus, abstracts, titles, as well as author keywords, we looked at the performance of authors, publications, journals, institutions, and nations in terms of publishing. To obtain an insight into the water and sanitation study topic, we used co-citation, co-occurrence, cooperation networks, theme networks and cluster analysis, word dynamics, thematic evolution, and other techniques. We filtered out five distinguishing themes using text mining and showed their temporal trends. The main outcome is that participation, as well as collaboration with countries of the Global South, is still lacking in the SDG 6 research sphere. Therefore, as an insight from this study, we proposed a conceptual framework, the sustainable development of water and sanitation (SDWS) framework, to classify the research domain of water and sanitation regarding its connections to the environment, economy, and society (i.e., sustainable development). The scientometric and text analysis results provide the contemporary state and overview of the water and sanitation research field, whereas the second, conceptual framework section, provides a better understanding of qualitative contents, by revealing the insights gained, as well as the important work to be done in future water and sanitation studies.

Globalization is embedded in socioeconomic development at the glocal scale (local to global). Drawing up from Kate Raworth’s Doughnut economics framework coupled with UN Sustainable development goals, we interrogate the relationship of globalization for socio-economic development (2000–2017). Here we have applied the Spearman correlation and data envelopment analysis to assess the efficiency of nations in ‘converting’ their level of globalization towards achieving socio-economic development along with trends of reaching the just operating space for 146 countries. Then, we calculate improvement targets and identify trends among income categories (World Bank). We have also analyzed the Malmquist productivity index for 34 large economies to understand spatiotemporal trends of change in efficiency and their contributing components (2001–2015). We have found that productivity change was mostly influenced by technical progress. A large group of countries are moving towards crossing desired thresholds; however, some are harnessing globalization efficiently to get assistance. It is possible to maintain dual achievement. However, some of the countries are lagging in one or both aspects. Most countries could attain just operating space even with their existing level of globalization. Our findings reveal the importance of the dual achievement: using contemporary features (such as globalization) for the benefit of socioeconomic development.