Summary

Voluntary national reviews (VNRs), are an important innovation as a United Nations process for follow up to the adoption of development agendas. The paper analyses how countries addressed three key cross-cutting issues of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in the VNRs submitted in 2017: leaving no one behind; addressing trade-offs through policy integration; and pursuing global partnership as means of implementation. While the VNRs contain already many interesting examples as basis for mutual learning and sharing of, the paper also identifies a need for more attention to these issues and more explicit discussions on strategies for their implementation.