El Día Después platform receives the recognition go!ODS of the United Nations

• Promoted by the United Nations Global Compact Spain and the Rafael del Pino Foundation, the go!ODS awards recognise impactful projects that contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

• The award to El Día Después falls under the category of SDG 17, Partnerships to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

Madrid, 23 February 2022 - The multi-actor platform El Día Después has been chosen as the winner of the go!ODS recognition in the category of Partnerships to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 17), in the third edition of these awards promoted by the United Nations Global Compact Spain and the Rafael del Pino Foundation. 

The go!ODS awards —which were delivered at a ceremony held in the Auditorium of the Rafael del Pino Foundation in Madrid— distinguish projects and innovations with the capacity for impact that contribute to the achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations 2030 Agenda.

A jury made up of renowned representatives from the private sector, academia and public administrations is responsible for awarding a specific recognition for each SDG. Out of the more than 200 nominations submitted in total, the multi-actor collaboration platform El Día Después was the chosen candidate in the case of the category corresponding to SDG 17 (partnerships to achieve the goals of the 2030 Agenda).

Within the framework of this platform, which was born with the vocation of contributing to public policy through action and collective intelligence, people from up to 80 institutions from different sectors (public administration, companies, NGOs and academia) have been collaborating for almost two years on specific projects and in their thematic communities, based on values of mutual trust and distributed leadership.

As a result of diverse and continuous activities in the form of multi-actor workshops, open conversations, articles, etc., El Día Después has promoted two new alliances: Mission citiES 2030 —which brings together Spanish cities to accelerate climate neutrality— and the Platform for Green Employment and Entrepreneurship —which was created to take advantage of the opportunities created by the green economy to integrate vulnerable groups.

Carlos Mataix, director of the Centre for Innovation in Technology for Human Development at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (itdUPM) and one of the promoters of the initiative, declared: “This is a recognition of deep and advanced collaboration, and is a significant endorsement of our understanding of partnerships as the key to accelerate sustainable transformation”.

Reflecting on the role of private enterprises, Mónica Oviedo, head of Sustainable Development and Agenda 2030 at the Iberdrola Group and one of the promoters of El Día Después, said: “Economic development is strongly linked to environmental conservation and social stability. Businesses are another very important actor in tackling complex problems such as climate change, inequality and the other challenges set out in the 2030 Agenda. In our experience, advanced forms of public-private-social collaboration such as those we have experienced in El Día Después are the way to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals”.

Asked about the future challenges of this platform, Leire Pajín, director of Global Development at ISGlobal, president of the Spanish Sustainable Development Network (REDS-SDSN), and one of the promoters of El Día Después, stressed: “At El Día Después we have decided to co-create collaborative processes and spaces for listening and dialogue to generate a new social contract. This is a line of work inspired by Antón Costas, president of the Economic and Social Council and member of El Día Después, to which we will dedicate our efforts throughout the year. We want to culminate in a major meeting in autumn, open to the whole of society, in which very different points of view are present and represented”.

For his part, Joan Roca Sagarra, executive president of the law firm RocaJunyent, outlined the relevance of the platform and its alliances as a meeting point to promote new areas of dialogue between all social and economic actors, whether public or private in nature. “Law cannot be an obstacle or impose limits on the forms of collaboration required by the times and the SDGs, and therefore being part of initiatives such as El Día Después challenges us and obliges us, as it is a challenge that forces us to innovate legally in order to achieve these spaces that the new times demand and that the legal framework does not expressly foresee”.

El Día Después is an open platform composed of individuals and entities from the public and private sector, academia and civil society to implement concrete and viable sustainable transformation solutions linked to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). More information about the initiative and the events already held at diadespues.org.