The sustainable development goals (SDGs) were adopted in 2015, succeeding the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). While the MDGs focused on improving well-being in the developing world, the 17 SDGs address all countries and aim at reconciling economic and social with ecological goals. We adopt a social ecology perspective and critically reflect on the SDGs’ potential for monitoring, supporting, and bringing about a transformation towards sustainability. Starting from a literature review on the SDGs, we link empirical findings from social ecology with analyses of SDG targets and indicators. First, we find that the SDGs fail to monitor absolute trends in resource use and thus prioritize economic growth over ecological integrity. Second, we discuss the contradictions between economic growth and sustainable resource use in early and late stages of industrialization processes and show that they are responsible for important trade-offs among SDG targets. Third, we analyze the transformative potential of the SDGs with a focus on the actors and institutions addressed to bring about transformative change. We find that the SDGs rely mainly on those institutions responsible for unsustainable resource use, and partly propose measures that even reinforce current trends towards less sustainability. Despite ascertaining limited transformative potential to the SDGs from an analytical perspective, we conclude by stressing the strategic relevance of the SDGs for visions, research, and practices of statt towards transformative change towards sustainability.

Their geomorphological characteristics make island systems special focal points for sustainability challenges. The Circular Economy (CE) Action Plan of the European Union foresees tailored solution sets for Europe's outermost regions and islands to tackle region-specific sustainability challenges. We address the question of how islands can achieve more sustainable resource use by utilizing the socioeconomic metabolism (SEM) framework to assess and explore CE strategies for the Greek island of Samothraki. For this purpose, we apply material and energy flow analysis on a regional level and derive, as one of the first studies, a complete time series from 1929 to 2019 for socioeconomic biophysical stocks and flows according to mass-balance principles for an island economy. Results show that in the past 90 years Samothraki's material stocks grew fivefold, domestic material consumption threefold, and solid waste generation fivefold. Samothraki transitioned from an almost entirely circular biophysical economy toward one in which 40% of input materials and 30% of output materials are estimated as non-circular. This transition resulted in an accumulated solid waste stock on the island almost half the size of current material stocks in use. With this study we aim at providing ideas and opportunities for achieving more sustainable and circular material use on small islands. The published SEM database aims at supporting the public and the private sector and the island community at large with information key to establishing more sustainable material and energy use patterns on Samothraki. This article met the requirements for a Gold–Gold JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges.