Territorial planning and the fragmented localization of the SDGs: Insights from Southwestern Colombia

Governments worldwide have formally adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), yet a persistent gap separates rhetorical alignment from substantive localization. This article argues that the gap cannot be understood through political will alone — it requires examining the administrative layer through which global goals are translated into local planning commitments. Drawing on a structured database of 5671 programmatic outputs from the 2024–2027 Territorial Development Plans of twelve municipalities in southwestern Colombia, covering urban, peri-urban, coastal and rural cases, we develop the concept of administrative translation to explain how planning instruments convert the 2030 Agenda into discrete, sectorally familiar deliverables while marginalizing cross-cutting, long-term and redistributive goals. The results reveal a pattern we call operational symbolic compliance, in which municipalities formally operationalize the SDGs through measurable outputs without reorganizing planning around SDG interdependencies. Social and institutional goals dominate, while gender equality, climate action, biodiversity and inequality reduction remain systematically marginal. Fiscal capacity alone does not appear sufficient to explain the observed variation, and instrument design appears to play a central role. These findings advance debates in earth system governance on fragmented architectures, accountability gaps and allocation justice, and they point to concrete reforms in planning instruments as the central lever for meaningful SDG localization.