Sustainability Indicators

Implementing sustainable development entails large shifts in defining, configuring, and prioritizing public policies. A singular requirement is to create the tools to assess the current situation, as well as the induced societal, economic, and environmental change. Sustainability indicators are in the first instance meant to meet this necessity. “Public choice” has always been a matter of monitoring, and thus valuing, societal evolution and development against criteria defined by individual or group preferences. In this sense, sustainability indicators have ancestors; that is, the System of National Accounts developed since the 1940s, the social indicators’ movement of the 1970s, and the formalization of environmental policy performance indicators since the 1980s.

Nearly as many definitions for indicators exist as for sustainability (or sustainable development). Generically, sustainability indicators provide an interpretation of the evolution of stocks and/or flows to account for human–environment interactions. Sustainability indicators are meant to participate in the (self-)generation of sustainable development by enhancing communication, triggering debate, enabling planning, and facilitating strategizing. Because sustainability indicators strive to render the invisible visible, they are enshrined in societal, technical, methodological, and scientific conventions, which entails that the definition, selection, configuration, and interpretation of a sustainability indicator implies articulating scientific and societal values at various levels.

Since the Brundtland Report in 1987 and the Rio Summit in 1992, there have been shifts in the interpretations of sustainability. Over the years, two parallel approaches have emerged to assist the implementation of sustainability into public policy processes. On the one hand, one observed the emergence of specific sustainability policies, and notably of sustainability strategies, which meant providing a top-down reference point for policy makers. On the other hand, a handful of specific instruments, processes, and tools were initiated that should assist in mainstreaming the translation of sustainability criteria and principles into policy processes by influencing the configuration of policy moments, such as public policy evaluation and assessment, policy communication, and policy formulation. Within this second, nonprogrammatic approach to translating sustainability into [Page 409]policies, the debate on the instruments, processes, and tools used generated a wave of processes at national, global, local, and urban levels, concerned with the construction of sustainability indicators. Before the turn of the millennium, every country in the developed world had its initiative on sustainability indicators either accomplished or under development. Hundreds of local and urban communities also had stepped into their indicator processes, often with a direct linkage to their Local Agenda 21 processes, sometimes with considerably interesting results, as has been the case, for instance, of the front-running Sustainable Seattle indicator initiative since 1993.

The reasons for the great number of initiatives are linked to the range of possible objectives pursued with indicator development. Indicators are developed to help define sustainability strategies, whereas other initiatives assess the success of their strategy with indicators. Indicators are used to evaluate and communicate about the performance of buildings and construction sites, as well as about the level of urbanism and land use planning. Indicators are initialized for small-scale evaluations of urban space management or the allocation and use of local development funds. Sustainability indexes are developed to rank stock portfolios and pension funds. Academia, as well as national and international institutions, are striving to configure composite indicators such as the ecological footprint, which is meant to replace or complement gross domestic product, whereas adaptations of the same gross domestic product to integrate environmental and social variables, such as the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare or Indicator of Genuine Savings, are meant to keep our economic status stable. Sometimes indicators seem to be mere by-products of data treatments, such as maps extruded from geographic information systems software. At times indicators represent the emerged part of an empirical calculus, as is the case with communicating the outcome of an extensive life-cycle analysis. On other occasions, indicators condense the results of complex and time-consuming data collection and structuration efforts, as with the attempts to green the national accounts by constructing satellite environmental accounts (e.g., the National Accounting Matrix including Environmental Accounts). Lately, indicators are outputs of sustainability impact assessments, as well as of processes using multicriteria decision analysis.

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