New Cohesion Policy 2021-2027: The Role of Indicators in the Assessment of the SDGs Targets Performance

The paper deals with the usefulness of indicators and indices in assessing the performance of a city or territory with respect to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their targets, in the context of the new European cohesion policy 2021-2027. An impact matrix has been developed in order to measure the performance of each indicator in achieving the SDGs and their targets in a real case study: the municipality of Rivoli, located in Piedmont region, which is currently involved in the programming of European and National recovery funds. The proposed model on the one hand can support the decision-making process in the assessment and monitoring procedures and on the other hand it can be of interest of technicians and freelances to simplify and optimize the conventional planning procedures to present project proposals of territorial transformation and with respect to the building of strategies with medium and long perspective. In this sense, this first application can determine the usefulness of the method to assess in a simple way the wide range of potential impacts, considering both the quantitative and the qualitative scale.