The 2030 Agenda has turned sustainability from a planning and reporting agenda into a demanding public-administration challenge. Governments are expected not only to align policies with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but also to coordinate across administrative silos, manage goal interactions and trade-offs, support local implementation, engage stakeholders, monitor progress and sustain public trust in long-term transformation. This article asks under what conditions Portuguese sustainability governance can move from formal SDG alignment to transformative implementation. It develops a theory-derived framework centred on five governance requirements: policy coherence, horizontal coordination, vertical coordination, collaborative participation and public-value protection, and monitoring-driven learning. Empirically, it adopts a theory-guided empirical diagnostic case study design, combining structured secondary evidence synthesis with comparative survey analysis from the European Social Survey Round 11 (ESS-11). The Portuguese evidence points to relevant instruments for planning, reporting and local mobilisation, but also to uneven implementation capacity. On weighted descriptive point estimates, Portugal is close to the ESS-11 average in institutional trust and democratic legitimacy, lower in social trust and civic participation, and higher in the author-constructed public-value/sustainability orientation index. These descriptive differences are not interpreted as statistically significant unless supported by an inferential test. The article argues that effective SDG implementation depends less on first-generation SDG tools than on the institutional and social capacity to turn formal alignment into coordinated, accountable, participatory and trusted administrative practice.

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Sustainable Development Goals,public administration,sustainability governance,institutional capacity,collaborative governance,policy coherence,public value,Portugal