Interpreting and Enacting the Sustainable Development Goals in Local Governments: Politicians’ and Managers’ Sensemaking and Sensegiving

ABSTRACT

This research examines how sensemaking and sensegiving processes shape the ways in which the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) become meaningful and actionable in local governments. Drawing on a multiple case study of three Italian cities, it explores how politicians and managers engage with the SDGs. That engagement runs through four interconnected processes: interpretive anchoring, the reconfiguration of organizational identity, communicative practices, and the organizational routines of planning, coordination, and accountability. Rather than treating SDG‐related planning documents, reporting tools and formal administrative instruments as textual artifacts, the analysis foregrounds the interpretive processes through which political and managerial actors construct, communicate, and enact sustainability meanings in everyday administrative practice. The findings contribute to sensemaking scholarship in public sector and sustainability research on two fronts. They illuminate the interpretive dynamics through which global sustainability agendas are translated into local organizational contexts, and they identify the processes by which sustainability‐oriented forms of public governance are gradually stabilized.