Parliamentarians for the Global Goals (PfGG) is a group set up to at essence make connections; acting as a global all-party group of individual parliamentary members and national parliamentary groups or caucuses, their focus is to encourage engagement in the implementation of UN Sustainable Development Goals as set out for the 2030 Agenda. From the outside looking in, seeing a groups specifically intended to raise awareness, strengthen peer-to-peer learning, and share the best practices and knowledge built from the contemporary history of conservation and development work was both encouraging and intriguing; the opportunity to work for this group during my LiA experience was one that I was consequently thrilled to get stuck into.

For the LiA experience, I was tasked to work on two areas of the project; firstly, to map current SDG practices and parliamentarians working to advocate for the 2030 agenda, and to design a ‘vetting’ process for the mapping catalogue website that is in the development stage currently. As my previous research summer had partly focused on pacific narratives, I requested to continue looking at Oceania; as this project’s mapping in the region had barely begun, I soon realised I had taken on a somewhat sizable task; not only based on the scale of the data but recognising that working for a group mapping parliaments required a strong sense of cultural understanding and contextual empathy. I began by making a list of all the parliamentary nations in the region, However, it quickly became obvious that this both was far too unwieldly and covered very few of the SDG projects in the area. Instead, I started working through the parliamentary nations based on the size of their parliament, whether unicameral or otherwise. This roughly equivalated to the size of their populations and generally correlated with the number of projects ongoing in the government system at both the local and national levels; interestingly however the mapping project often found a minimum number of NGO development projects in a nation regardless of its size, indicating the presence of outsider groups even in the smallest countries. The mapping research provided a unique opportunity to work in a flexible and occasionally unpredictable environment, collaborating with groups I would never have otherwise come into contact with; working between parliaments in this fashion defined the unique experience.

Perhaps the most challenging element of the project was designing the vetting process; having been given an extremely broad and relatively undefined brief, I began by examining similar systems in another context. For instance, while the Australian SDG effort has created a panel-display system with useful information displayed on each image, by looking at the information displayed itself and considering what information would be searched by (for instance, in social media platforms such as Pinterest), a novel approach was considered in each design. The leadership element of the experience became forefront here, as I largely directed my own project while keeping in conjunction with my colleague’s work. While there were certainly times where I struggled with directing my own project, and indeed felt a loss of direction keenly where ideas failed, I am grateful for the support I received from supervisors as well as others working on the project. In the end, what could have become an overwhelming experience turned out to be a fascinating insight into the development stage of a concept, providing invaluable experience that I am able to take forward.

I think in reflection this is the most critical aspect I will take from the LiA experience; not only the activities and the technical knowledge gained from them itself, but the management skills and learning curves that were experienced along the way. I am hoping that my time with PfGG has not only motivated an interest in their area of expertise, but has equipped me with the necessary skills to apply myself further and more effectively in projects to come.