What Contribution Is International Exchange and Solidarity Volunteering Making to the 2030 Agenda? Experimental Study – Focus on SDG 4

As part of a universal call to action to eliminate poverty, protect the planet, and improve the daily lives of people around the world, the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the Member States of the United Nations in September 2015.

Ten years ahead of time, the 2030 Agenda has become a major concern for all development aid actors, including those of International Exchange and Solidarity Volunteering (IESV) and those involved in civic engagement. This international sustainable development framework is today a benchmark instrument, as a tool of institutional management and influence on public policy, as well as for raising awareness of local and/or global development challenges. It is thus becoming an increasingly essential component in the discourse of volunteering’s actors, as well as the subject of projects, internal policies, and logics of influence.

Civic engagement in the broad sense is not mentioned in the 2030 Agenda—nor in its 17 SDGs, its 169 targets, or its 233 indicators. That may seem paradoxical, inasmuch as international volunteering affects all of the SDGs through the diversity of its intervention methods, thematic issues explored, territories impacted, and stakeholders involved—all of which benefit civil societies around the world, thus contributing to the principle of “leave no one behind.”

France Volontaires and 11 of its member organisations decided to undertake an experimental study project focusing on the 2030 Agenda, the results of which are presented in this publication. This project made it possible to inaugurate the work of France Volontaires’ study programme, whose aim is to assess international volunteering’s social utility through the French volunteering system/sector.