Accounting for sustainability: combining qualitative and quantitative research in developing ‘indicators’ of sustainability

Abstract

Indicators‐based projects are currently central to many local, city‐wide, national and international sustainability initiatives. The quantitative basis of many such projects means that achieving sustainability through them is often undertaken as a technical task. The size, scope and sheer number of indicators included within many such projects means that they are often unwieldy and resist effective implementation. Arguably, the techno‐scientific ‘edge’ inherent in them tends to blur the possibilities for bringing into question the structures of power and criteria by which values are translated into practice. It limits the way that a community may use indicators to support sustainable practices or to challenge unsustainable practices. The article discusses some of the methodological issues that arise when setting out to develop and implement qualitative indicators of sustainability that incorporate some quantitative metrics. This alternative approach involves people in actively learning and negotiating over how best to put sustainability into practice. The aim of such a research method is to engage citizens in the job of achieving sustainability as a task of itself, undertaken on terms acceptable to them in the context of the communities in which they live.

Keywords:

• sustainability
• community
• qualitative and quantitative research
• mixed methods
• indicators

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Meg Holden, Martin Mulligan, Liam Magee, as well as Stephanie McCarthy and Caroline Bayliss of the UN Global Compact Cities Programme, and Alex Fearnside, Michaela Lang and the Critical Reference Group of the City of Melbourne’s Residential Sustainability Project.

Notes

1. ‘Social mapping’, as a method, has been used in projects across Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka and Timor‐Leste. It involves asking people to plot out where they see the boundaries of their locale, their community or communities, and their responses to process of interchange that cross that space. This is used to refine understandings of space, community, polity and place. It involves walking with and talking to people as they move through defined spaces, and seeing how their understandings and shaping of their world is informed via their interactions and movements. Social mapping in the first instance is geared towards the overall project objectives, and then related with the social themes used in the project. These are interpreted in terms of a series of layers of social analysis that draw upon the theoretical levels of the applied research methodology, research thus moving from the empirical to the abstract and back again in a constant journey of return, testing each level against the others.