Identifying Robust Policy Portfolios for Advancing the SDGs in China: An Integrated MADM Approach

Despite growing efforts toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the systemic impacts of cross-sectoral policy portfolios on China’s overall sustainability—spanning the economic, social, and environmental dimensions—remain insufficiently explored. Meanwhile, relying on a single aggregated method for overall SDG assessment may limit the reliability and robustness of evaluation results. To address this, we develop an integrated policy assessment framework that couples the iSDG-China model with an ensemble of multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) methods. Within this framework, the long-term dynamic impacts of policy portfolios on the 17 SDGs are simulated, and their overall sustainability performance is ranked to identify robust top- and bottom-performing portfolios that show consistent results across evaluation methods. Results show that policy performance varies substantially across SDGs: portfolios that strongly promote one goal may hinder others. The top-ranked robust portfolios consistently exhibit synergies among education access, universal health coverage, renewable energy expansion, land conservation, and water-use efficiency, whereas single-policy portfolios perform poorly. Comparative analyses further reveal the distributional characteristics of robust portfolios, differences between short- and long-term outcomes, and methodological consistency patterns across MADM methods. We conclude that multi-objective, cross-sectoral policy portfolios offer the most resilient pathways toward achieving overall sustainability. The proposed iSDG-MADM integrated framework enhances the reliability of sustainability assessments and provides robust and general policy recommendations.