26th meeting of the Europe 2020 Steering Committee

The 26th meeting of the EU2020 Steering Committee (SC) was held at the EESC on 26 September 2016.

It was one of a number of debates, starting on 1 June, in which the SC discussed various aspects of sustainable and development-focused growth. External guests were Marco Mira d'Ercole, head of the Division for Household Statistics and Progress Measurement at the OECD, and Romain Pardo, policy analyst at the European Policy Centre. The specific focus was on the relationship between the Europe 2020 strategy and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were adopted by the UN in September 2015 and which the Commission is now preparing to implement at EU level. Many of the SDGs are identical with or very similar to the EU2020 targets – although they are more comprehensive than the EU2020 in social and environmental matters – and the challenge is to map how these two horizontal strategies can interact.