Un stainability indicators

INDICATORS

Still another way to define sustainable development is in how it is measured. Indeed, despite sustainable develop­ment’s creative ambiguity, the most seri­ous efforts to define it, albeit implicit in many cases, come in the form of indicators. Combining global, national, and local initiatives, there are literally hundreds of efforts to define appropri­ate indicators and to measure them. Recently, a dozen such efforts were reviewed. Half were global in cover­age, using country or regional data (the UN Commission on Sustainable Devel­opment, Consultative Group on Sustain­able Development Indicators, Wellbe­ing Index, Environmental Sustainability Index, Global Scenario Group, and the Ecological Footprint). Of the remain­ing efforts, three were country stud­ies (in the United States, the Genuine Progress Indicator and the Interagency Working Group on Sustainable Devel­opment Indicators, and in Costa Rica, the System of Indicators for Sustainable Development); one was a city study (the Boston Indicators Project); one was global in scope but focused on indica­tors of unsustainability (State Failure Task Force); and one focused on cor­porate and nongovernmental entities (Global Reporting Initiative).

Table lists each study with its source, the number of indica­tors used, and the implicit or explicit definitions used to describe what is to be sustained, what is to be developed, and for how long.

Two major observations emerge. The first is the extraordinarily broad list of items to be sustained and to be devel­oped. These reflect the inherent mal­leability of “sustainable development” as well as the internal politics of the measurement efforts. In many of the cases, the initiative is undertaken by a diverse set of stakeholders, and the resulting lists reflect their varied aspi­rations. For example, in the UN Com­mission on Sustainable Development, the stakeholders are nations negotiating how to measure their relative progress or lack of progress toward sustainable development. In the Boston Indicators Project, the stakeholders are community members with varied opinions about desirable goals, policies, and investment priorities for the future. In the Global Reporting Initiative, the stakeholders are corporations, investors, regulatory agen­cies, and civil society groups discussing how to account for corporate actions affecting sustainable development. With many stakeholders, each with different definitions, achieving consensus often takes the form of long “laundry lists” of indicators, and definitional differences are downplayed in favor of reaching a common set of indicators. Thus, to be inclusive, the range of indicators becomes very broad. Half the exam­ined initiatives, however, represent less-inclusive research or advocacy groups who share a more narrow and homog­enous view of sustainable development. While also assembling large numbers of indicators, these groups tend to aggre­gate them to reflect their distinctive vision of sustainability.

A second observation is that few of the efforts are explicit about the time period in which sustainable develop­ment should be considered. Despite the emphasis in the standard definition on intergenerational equity, there seems in most indicator efforts a focus on the present or the very short term. Three exceptions, however, are worth noting: The UN Commission on Sustainable Development uses some human devel­opment indicators defined in terms of a single generation (15–25 years), the Global Scenario Group quantifies its scenarios through 2050 (approximately two generations), and the Ecological Footprint argues that in the long run an environmental footprint larger than one Earth cannot be sustained. Overall, these diverse indicator efforts reflect the ambiguous time horizon of the standard definition—“now and in the future.”

Definitions of sustainable development implicitly or explicitly adopted by selected indicator initiatives

Indicator initiative		Number of indicators		Implicit or explicit definition?	What is to be sustained?		What is to be developed?	For how long?
Commission on Sustainable Developmenta		58		Implicit, but informed by Agenda 21	Climate, clean air, land productivity, ocean productivity, fresh water, and biodiversity		Equity, health, education, housing, security, stabilized population	Sporadic references to 2015
Consultative Group on Sustainable Development Indicatorsb		46		Same as above	Same as above		Same as above	Not stated; uses data for 1990 and 2000
Wellbeing Indexc		88		Explicit	“A condition in which the ecosystem maintains its diversity and quality—and thus its capacity to support people and the rest of life—and its potential to adapt to change and provide a wide change of choices and opportunities for the future”		“A condition in which all members of society are able to determine and meet their needs and have a large range of choices to meet their potential”	Not stated; uses most recent data as of 2001 and includes some indicators of recent change (such as inflation and deforestation)
Environmental Sustainability Indexd		68		Explicit	“Vital environmental systems are maintained at healthy levels, and to the extent to which levels are improving rather than deteriorating” [and] “levels of anthropogenic stress are low enough to engender no demonstrable harm to its environmental systems.”		Resilience to environmental disturbances (“People and social systems are not vulnerable (in the way of basic needs such as health and nutrition) to environmental disturbances; becoming less vulnerable is a sign that a society is on a track to greater sustainability”); “institutions and underlying social patterns of skills, attitudes, and networks that foster effective responses to environmental challenges”; and cooperation among countries “to manage common environmental problems”	Not stated; uses most recent data as of 2002 and includes some indicators of recent change (such as deforestation) or predicted change (such as population in 2025)
Genuine Progress Indicatore		26		Explicit	Clean air, land, and water		Economic performance, families, and security	Not stated; computed annually from 1950–2000
Global Scenario Groupf	65		Explicit			“Preserving the essential health, services, and beauties of the earth requires stabilizing the climate at safe levels, sustaining energy, materials, and water resources, reducing toxic emissions, and maintaining the world’s ecosystems and habitats.”	Institutions to “meet human needs for food, water, and health, and provide opportunities for education, employment and participation”	Through 2050
Ecological Footprintg	6		Explicit			“The area of biologically productive land and water required to produce the resources consumed and to assimilate the wastes produced by humanity”	Not explicitly stated; computed annually from 1961–1999
U.S. Interagency Working Group on Sustainable Development Indicatorsh	40		Explicit			Environment, natural resources, and ecosystem services	Dignity, peace, equity, economy, employment, safety, health, and quality of life	Current and future generations
Costa Ricai	255		Implicit			Ecosystem services, natural resources, and biodiversity	Economic and social development	Not stated; includes some time series dating back to 1950
Boston Indicator Projectj	159		Implicit			Open/green space, clean air, clean water, clean land, valued ecosystems, biodiversity, and aesthetics	Civil society, culture, economy, education, housing, health, safety, technology, and transportation	Not stated; uses most recent data as of 2000 and some indicators of recent change (such as change in poverty rates)
State Failure Task Forcek	75		Explicit			Intrastate peace/security	Two years
Global Reporting Initiativel	97		Implicit			Reduced consumption of raw materials and reduced emissions of environmental contaminants from production or product use	Profitability, employment, diversity of workforce, dignity of workforce, health/safety of workforce, and health/safety/privacy of customers	Current reporting year

VALUES

Still another mode of defining sustain­able development is through the val­ues that represent or support sustainable development. But values, like sustain­able development, have many mean­ings. In general, values are expressions of, or beliefs in, the worth of objects, qualities, or behaviors. They are typi­cally expressed in terms of goodness or desirability or, conversely, in terms of badness or avoidance. They often invoke feelings, define or direct us to goals, frame our attitudes, and provide standards against which the behaviors of individuals and societies can be judged. As such, they often overlap with sustain­ability goals and indicators. Indeed, the three pillars of sustainable development; the benchmark goals of the Millennium Declaration, the Sustainability Transi­tion, and the Great Transition; and the many indicator initiatives are all expres­sions of values.

But these values, as described in the previous sections, do not encompass the full range of values supporting sustain­able development. One explicit state­ment of supporting values is found in the Millennium Declaration. Underlying the 60 specific goals of the Millennium Declaration is an articulated set of fundamental values seen as essen­tial to international relations: freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature, and shared responsibility (see the box on page 16).

The Millennium Declaration was adopted by the UN General Assem­bly, but the origins of the declaration’s set of fundamental values are unclear. In contrast, the origins of the Earth Charter Initiative—which defines the Earth Charter as a “declaration of fun­damental principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society in the 21st century”- is well docu­mented.

The initiative answers the call of the World Commission on Environ­ment and Development for creation of “a universal declaration” that would “consolidate and extend relevant legal principles,” create “new norms . . . needed to maintain livelihoods and life on our shared planet,” and “ guide state behavior in the transition to sustain­able development.” An effort to draft a charter at the 1992 Earth Summit was unsuccessful. In 1994 a new Earth Charter Initiative was launched that involved “the most open and participa­tory consultation process ever conduct­ed in connection with an international document. Thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations from all regions of the world, different cultures, and diverse sectors of society . . . par­ticipated.” Released in the year 2000, the Earth Charter has been endorsed by more than 14,000 individuals and organizations worldwide representing millions of members, yet it has failed to attain its desired endorsement or adoption by the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development or the UN General Assembly.

The values of the Earth Charter are derived from “contemporary sci­ence, international law, the teachings of indigenous peoples, the wisdom of the world’s great religions and philo­sophical traditions, the declarations and reports of the seven UN summit confer­ences held during the 1990s, the global ethics movement, numerous nongovern­mental declarations and people’s treaties issued over the past thirty years, and best practices for building sustainable communities.” For example, in 1996, more than 50 international law instru­ments were surveyed and summarized in Principles of Environmental Conser­vation and Sustainable Development: Summary and Survey. Four first-order principles were identified and expressed in the Earth Charter as the community of life, ecological integrity, social and economic justice, and democracy, non­violence, and peace. Sixteen second-order principles expand on these four, and 61 third-order principles elaborate on the 16. For example, the core prin­cipal of social and economic justice is elaborated by principles of equitable economy, eradication of poverty, and the securing of gender equality and the rights of indigenous peoples. In turn, each of these principles is further expli­cated with three or four specific actions or intentions.

PRACTICE

Finally—and in many ways, most importantly—sustainable development is defined in practice. The practice includes the many efforts at defining the concept, establishing goals, creating indicators, and asserting values. But additionally, it includes developing social move­ments, organizing institutions, crafting sustainability science and technology, and negotiating the grand compromise among those who are principally con­cerned with nature and environment, those who value economic development, and those who are dedicated to improv­ing the human condition.

A Social Movement

Sustainable development can be viewed as a social movement—“a group of people with a common ideology who try together to achieve certain general goals.” In an effort to encourage the creation of a broadly based social move­ment in support of sustainable develop­ment, UNCED was the first interna­tional, intergovernmental conference to provide full access to a wide range of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and to encourage an independent Earth Summit at a nearby venue. More than 1,400 NGOs and 8,000 journalists partic­ipated. One social movement launched from UNCED was the effort described above to create an Earth Charter, to ratify it, and to act upon its principles.

In 2002, 737 new NGOs and more than 8,046 representatives of major groups (business, farmers, indigenous peoples, local authorities, NGOs, the scientific and technological com­munities, trade unions, and women) attended the World Summit on Sus­tainable Development in Johannesburg. These groups organized themselves into approximately 40 geographical and issue-based caucuses.

But underlying this participation in the formal international sustainable development events are a host of social movements struggling to identify what sustainable development means in the context of specific places and peoples. One such movement is the effort of many communities, states, provinces, or regions to engage in community exercises to define a desirable sustain­able future and the actions needed to attain it. Examples include Sustainable Seattle, Durban’s Local Agenda 21 Programme, the Lancashire County Council Local Agenda 21 Strategy, and the Minnesota Sustainable Develop­ment Initiative.

Three related efforts are the sustain­able livelihoods movement, the global solidarity movement, and the corporate responsibility movement. The move­ment for sustainable livelihoods consists of local initiatives that seek to create opportunities for work and sustenance that offer sustainable and credible alter­natives to current processes of devel­opment and modernization. Consisting primarily of initiatives in developing countries, the movement has counter­parts in the developed world, as seen, for example, in local efforts in the United States to mandate payment of a “living wage” rather than a minimum wage.

The global solidarity movement seeks to support poor people in developing countries in ways that go beyond the altruistic support for development fund­ing. Their campaigns are expressed as antiglobalization or “globalization from below” in critical appraisals of major international institutions, in the move­ment for the cancellation of debt, and in critiques of developed-world poli­cies—such as agricultural subsidies—that significantly impact developing countries and especially poor people.

The corporate responsibility move­ment has three dimensions: various cam­paigns by NGOs to change corporate environmental and social behavior; efforts by corporations to contribute to sustainable development goals and to reduce their negative environmental and social impacts; and international initiatives such as the UN Global Com­pact or the World Business Council for Sustainable Development that seek to harness the knowledge, energies, and activities of corporations to better serve nature and society. For instance, in the just-selected Global 100, the most sustainable corporations in the world, the top three corporations were Toyota, selected for its leadership in introducing hybrid vehicles; Alcoa, for management of materials and energy efficiency; and British Petroleum, for leadership in greenhouse gas emissions reduction, energy efficiency, renewables, and waste treatment and handling.

A related social movement focuses on excessive material consumption and its impacts on the environment and society and seeks to foster voluntary simplicity of one form or another. These advocates argue that beyond certain thresholds, ever-increasing consump­tion does not increase subjective levels of happiness, satisfaction, or health. Rather, it often has precisely the oppo­site effect. Thus, these efforts present a vision of “the good life” in which people work and consume less than is prevalent in today’s consumer-driven affluent societies.

As with any social movement, sus­tainable development encounters oppo­sition. The opponents of sustainable development attack from two very dif­ferent perspectives: At one end of the spectrum are those that view sustainable development as a top-down attempt by the United Nations to dictate how the people of the world should live their lives—and thus as a threat to individual freedoms and property rights. At the other end are those who view sustain­able development as capitulation that implies development as usual, driven by the interests of big business and multilateral institutions and that pays only lip service to social justice and the protection of nature.

Institutions

The goals of sustainable develop­ment have been firmly embedded in a large number of national, international, and nongovernmental institutions. At the intergovernmental level, sustain­able development is now found as a central theme throughout the United Nations and its specialized agencies. Evidence of this shift can be seen in the creation of the Division of Sustain­able Development within the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the establishment of a vice president for environmentally and socially sustainable development at the World Bank, and the declaration of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. Similarly, numerous national and local govern­mental entities have been established to create and monitor sustainable develop­ment strategies. According to a recent survey by the International Council for Local Environment Initiatives, “6,416 local authorities in 113 countries have either made a formal commitment to Local Agenda 21 or are actively under­taking the process,” and the number of such processes has been growing dramatically. In addition to these gov­ernmental efforts, sustainable develop­ment has emerged in the organization charts of businesses (such as Lafarge), consultancies (including CH2M Hill), and investment indices (such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index).

Sustainability Science and Technology

Sustainable development is also becoming a scientific and technologi­cal endeavor that, according to the Initiative on Science and Technology for Sustainable Development, “seeks to enhance the contribution of knowledge to environmentally sustainable human development around the world.” This emerging enterprise is focused on deepening our understanding of socio-­ecological systems in particular places while exploring innovative mechanisms for producing knowledge so that it is relevant, credible, and legitimate to local decision makers.

The efforts of the science and technolo­gy community to contribute to sustainable development is exemplified in the actions of the major Academies of Science and International Disciplinary Unions, in collaborative networks of individual sci­entists and technologists, in emerging programs of interdisciplinary education, and in many efforts to supply scientific support to communities.

A Grand Compromise

One of the successes of sustainable development has been its ability to serve as a grand compromise between those who are principally concerned with nature and environment, those who value economic development, and those who are dedicated to improving the human condition. At the core of this compromise is the inseparability of envi­ronment and development described by the World Commission on Environment and Development.

Thus, much of what is described as sustainable development in practice are negotiations in which workable compromises are found that address the environmental, economic, and human development objectives of competing interest groups. Indeed, this is why so many definitions of sustainable development include statements about open and democratic decisionmaking.

At the global scale, this compromise has engaged the wealthy and poor coun­tries of the world in a common endeavor. Before this compromise was formally adopted by UNCED, the poorer coun­tries of the world often viewed demands for greater environmental protection as a threat to their ability to develop, while the rich countries viewed some of the development in poor countries as a threat to valued environmental resources. The concept of sustainable development attempts to couple development aspira­tions with the need to preserve the basic life support systems of the planet.

SO, WHAT IS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT?

Since the Brundtland Commission first defined sustainable development, dozens, if not hundreds, of scholars and practitioners have articulated and pro­moted their own alternative definition; yet a clear, fixed, and immutable mean­ing remains elusive. This has led some observers to call sustainable develop­ment an oxymoron: fundamentally con­tradictory and irreconcilable. Further, if anyone can redefine and reapply the term to fit their purposes, it becomes meaningless in practice, or worse, can be used to disguise or greenwash socially or environmentally destructive activities.

Yet, despite these critiques, each defi­nitional attempt is an important part of an ongoing dialogue. In fact, sustain­able development draws much of its resonance, power, and creativity from its very ambiguity. The concrete challenges of sustainable development are at least as heterogeneous and complex as the diversity of human societies and natural ecosystems around the world. As a con­cept, its malleability allows it to remain an open, dynamic, and evolving idea that can be adapted to fit these very different situations and contexts across space and time. Likewise, its openness to interpre­tation enables participants at multiple levels, from local to global, within and across activity sectors, and in institutions of governance, business, and civil society to redefine and reinterpret its meaning to fit their own situation.

Thus, the concept of sustainability has been adapted to address very different challenges, rang­ing from the planning of sustainable cit­ies to sustainable livelihoods, sustainable agriculture to sustainable fishing, and the efforts to develop common corporate standards in the UN Global Compact and in the World Business Council for Sus­tainable Development.

Despite this creative ambiguity and openness to interpretation, sustainable development has evolved a core set of guiding principles and values, based on the Brundtland Commission’s standard definition to meet the needs, now and in the future, for human, economic, and social development within the restraints of the life support systems of the planet. Further, the connotations of both of the phrase’s root words, “sustainable” and “development” are generally quite positive for most people, and their com­bination imbues this concept with inher­ent and near-universal agreement that sustainability is a worthwhile value and goal—a powerful feature in diverse and conflicted social contexts.

Importantly, however, these underly­ing principles are not fixed and immuta­ble but the evolving product of a global dialogue, now several decades old, about what sustainability should mean. The original emphasis on economic devel­opment and environmental protection has been broadened and deepened to include alternative notions of develop­ment (human and social) and alternative views of nature (anthropocentric versus ecocentric). Thus, the concept maintains a creative tension between a few core principles and openness to reinterpre­tation and adaptation to different social and ecological contexts.

Sustainable development thus requires the participation of diverse stakeholders and perspectives, with the ideal of rec­onciling different and sometimes oppos­ing values and goals toward a new syn­thesis and subsequent coordination of mutual action to achieve multiple values simultaneously and even synergistically.

As real-world experience has shown, however, achieving agreement on sus­tainability values, goals, and actions is often difficult and painful work, as different stakeholder values are forced to the surface, compared and contrasted, criticized and debated. Sometimes indi­vidual stakeholders find the process too difficult or too threatening to their own values and either reject the process entirely to pursue their own narrow goals or critique it ideologically, without engaging in the hard work of negotiation and compromise.

Critique is nonetheless a vital part of the conscious evolution of sustainable development—a concept that, in the end, represents diverse local to global efforts to imagine and enact a positive vision of a world in which basic human needs are met without destroying or irrevocably degrading the natural sys­tems on which we all depend.