The 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of 17 global goals making up the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: an agenda for action to achieve human well-being, equitable prosperity and a healthy planet.  The SDGs span many dimensions, including economics, society, culture, environment, and technology.

The Oxford Martin School invites Expressions of Interest for interdisciplinary research projects on the interconnections between the Sustainable Development Goals.  We are interested in projects that explore synergies or trade-offs between two or more goals, and in doing so help deliver better outcomes.  We are looking to receive proposals that investigate or identify leverage points whereby progress on multiple goals can be achieved simultaneously, or which show how actions to achieve one goal may hamper progress on another and how this might be avoided.  Successful proposals must demonstrate clearly how their outcomes could make a meaningful and timely contribution to the delivery of the goals.

The Oxford Martin School aims to support new ways of conceptualising, analysing and addressing the problems of the 21^st Century in an interdisciplinary manner. The School judges research projects by their scale, excellence, impact and additionality.  In the context of this call, scale means addressing an important aspect of achieving multiple SDGs.  The projects need to demonstrate outstanding research excellence and that, if successful, they will have significant impact on the delivery of SDGs.  The School looks to demonstrate additionality, bringing together innovative research groups and supporting projects that could not be funded from existing sources.

The process

We request that you provide a short (maximum of four pages) description of the proposed research and a short CV for each proposed Principal Investigator.  The vast majority of projects funded by the School have multiple Principal Investigators from different Departments and we are particularly interested to receive expressions of interest from consortia that span different divisions.

The proposals will be considered by the Management Committee of the Oxford Martin School.

Deadline for Expressions of Interest: 5pm on Monday 5^th November 2018

Requests for full proposals will be issued in mid-December.  The deadline for full proposals will be in early February, and it is hoped that final decisions will be made in March.  It is envisaged that the first research teams would start work in Michaelmas term 2019.

We anticipate that the Oxford Martin School will contribute up to a total of £1 million per project over a period of two to five years.

For more details please visit www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/research/funding