Identifying Key Priorities and Regional Development Gaps in the Local Level: The Case of the State of Mexico

The 2030 Agenda calls for the collection of data at the local level to contextualize sustainable development challenges and monitor the progress of the SDGs. While local governments in fact use data, the level of analytics that are used to construct regional agendas is not homogenous. We propose a systematic approach for the creation of local agendas that identify development gaps, while fostering the multidimensionality and interconnectivity of public problems that become systemic development bottlenecks at the local level. We systematically identify local priorities in terms of how much the existence of such problems aggravate other issues. Our approach builds on the acceleration and MAPS framework and includes community participation to appropriate priorities. While further analysis is required to assist policy analysis and recommendations, this first step for identifying local priorities is easily replicable and promising for harnessing data and fostering deeper analytical projects for the creation of local agendas.