Guest editorial

Abstract

Social marketing and the United Nations sustainable development goals: I, We and All of Us Sustainable development is a critical challenge for many countries worldwide.Indeed, humanity is confronting a range of overlapping sustainable development challenges.These include environmental challenges such as climate change and environmental degradation, and broader humanitarian challenges such as poverty, disaster, social injustice, inequalities, unsustainable consumption and production and human rights violations (Truong, 2017).To address these challenges, in 2015, the United Nations (UN) adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a call for action "to achieve a better and more sustainable future".The SDGs include ending poverty, ending hunger, ensuring health and well-being, ensuring quality education, achieving gender equality, ensuring access to water and sanitation, ensuring affordable and clean energy, promoting decent work and economic growth, building sustainable industry, innovation and infrastructure, reducing inequalities, making sustainable cities and communities, ensuring sustainable consumption and production, taking climate action, conserving marine resources, halting biodiversity loss, promoting peace, justice and strong institutions and revitalising partnerships for sustainable development (UN, 2015).These goals have captured widespread attention, raised public awareness, promoted political accountability and increased social pressures to address them.They have also been embraced by global, national and local institutions and organisations, become a research rubric in many disciplines, and have been widely taught at schools and universities (Sachs et al., 2019).Yet, it is somewhat surprising that the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the SDGs have attracted relatively limited scholarly attention in the social marketing field.This is despite social marketing being successfully applied in many areas of practical application that are relevant to the SDGs.For example, many public health initiatives have relied on social marketing to address SDG 3 (ensuring health and well-being) by promoting health education, adopting family planning, using modern contraceptive methods, and tackling HIV/AIDS (Truong, 2017).Nevertheless, despite the limited scholarly attention, the social marketing discipline has continually expanded its areas of practical application, from public health to poverty alleviation, environmental protection, healthy lifestyles and sustainable consumption and production (Truong et al., 2021).It has also shifted from its primary focus on individual behavioural change (i.e.downstream) towards exploration of its potential in influencing institutional and organisational change (i.e.upstream) and more recently addressing broader macro-level or systemic challenges (Domegan, 2008;Truong et al., 2021).On the one hand, this shift in focus reflects an increased recognition within the social marketing discipline (and beyond) that beneficial change needs to take place at the individual, organisational and systemic levels (Carvalho and Mazzon, 2019).On the other hand, it challenges the social marketing discipline to directly address broader ranging sustainable development challengesparticularly those that aim at achieving "transformative" change for the greater good (Saunders et al., 2015).It was for this reason that we put forward a special issue in the Journal of Social Marketing that aimed to share interesting, meaningful and theoretically grounded social marketing research papers that placed the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the SDGs at its heart, and that clearly focused attention on the UN "urgent call for action" in Guest editorial 1

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.