Re-thinking sustainability indicators: local perspectives of urban sustainability

Abstract

Measuring sustainability is not only a contentious issue, but one which has captured the attention of both academics and politicians since the late 1980s. A plethora of methods and approaches have been developed over the last decades or so, from rapid measurements as inputs to specific projects, to longer-term processes of research, monitoring and wider learning. Indicators have been, however, the most influential measuring tool of all and despite the fact that the tensions between expert-led and citizen-led models in their development have fuelled much debate in the literature. It has been suggested that integrating the two approaches would tap into various levels of ‘knowledge’ of sustainability and thus, be a better way of assessing sustainability. However, little is known of whether these ‘integrated’ sets of sustainability indicators work in practice, or indeed reflect the local perspectives, values and understandings of sustainability which they aim to represent. This paper aims to fill this gap. First, an ‘integrative’ set of indicators is designed and second, this is discussed with over 60 ‘sustainability experts’ and 130 residents living in three urban areas in the UK. It is found that the set of indicators is generally a good reflection of urban sustainability in these areas, however, people tend to assign different degrees of ‘importance’ to individual indicators, something which is little accounted for when measuring urban sustainability. The paper concludes that sustainability indicators are not isolated pieces of information, but manifestations of local underlying processes and interconnections that can be mapped and which have the potential to expand our understanding of local sustainability.

Keywords:

• indicators
• sustainability
• measurement
• urban sustainability
• sustainable communities

Notes

1. Scholars in the late 1980s and early 1990s approached ‘sustainable development’ from an economics background (for example, Pearce 1989, Dasgupta 1993), attempting to price the environment through a framework of fiscal controls and incentives (see Dresner 2002 for a comprehensive discussion of this).

2. Post-positivist approaches include: critical theory, post-modernism, constructivism and normative theory.

3. For a detailed discussion of the limitations of public participation in sustainability indicator development and application see Kelly and Moles (2002).

4. For a fuller discussion of the five methods, including their limitations and strengths as well as area of use, see Alkire (2008) and Robeyns (2005a, 2005b).

5. A number of theoretical models of sustainability were pursued from the late 1980s, which culminated with the Trefoil diagram of social, environmental and economic integration, also called the ‘people, planet, and prosperity’ or ‘triple bottom line’ model (Parkin 2000, Pope et al. 2004). More sophisticated models have emerged recently, including the ‘embedded’ or ‘Russian Doll’ model, which overlaps instead of intersecting the three dimensions (O’Riordan et al. 2001), and ‘the prism’ model that adds governance as the fourth dimension of sustainability (Spangenberg 2003, 2004).

6. ‘Sustainability experts’ included heads of policy, research and strategy at the local and regional level, urban regeneration and neighbourhood managers, planners and designers; while ‘community representative and stakeholders’ included local head teachers, businesses, police, health services, housing associations and NGOs.