Alan Bond, Angus Morrison-Saunders and Richard Howitt, Routledge, 2013, 296 pages, Series: Natural and Built Environment Series. Paperback: 978-0-415-59849-1, £29.99. Hardback: 978-0-415-59848-4, £105.00. eBook: 978-0-203-11262-5
Sustainability assessment is increasingly used to support policy-and plan-making, as well as project design, across the globe. As the title suggests, this book emphasizes the pluralistic nature of sustainability assessment and the implications for achieving more sustainable decision-making. The book is structured into four parts. The first explains why sustainability assessment is needed and what theoretical frameworks can be considered when evaluating practice. The current status of decision-making with respect to sustainable outcome is examined, and six imperatives for sustainability assessment are presented, which are worth spelling out: reversing the prevailing trends towards deeper unsustainability; ensuring integrated attention to key intertwined factors; seeking mutually reinforcing gains; minimizing trade-offs; respecting the context; and engaging the public.
The second part examines pluralism, that is, the existence of different possible interpretations of a number of key issues (including the imperatives above, in my view) relating to the outcome of sustainability assessment. This part starts by discussing the pluralistic nature of the meaning of effectiveness in relation to sustainability assessment, paving the way for the development of a framework to assess effectiveness, which is presented and applied in the third part. Other issues covered here include time and spatial scales, and more precisely the implications for sustainability assessment of having to deal with contested time horizons (Chapter 4) and contested spatiality (Chapter 5). These are challenging topics, deeply connected to the overarching goal of sustainability: the promotion of inter- and intra-generational equity. The chapters take a very practice-oriented perspective, providing both exemplary case studies and key ideas for practitioners. On the downside, the theory sections are rather thin here, although well referenced. A broader background and ‘state of thinking’ sections in both chapters would have better prepared the readers to digest, and make good use of, the remainder of the book. The chapters that follow address, respectively, legal pluralism, that is, the role courts play in interpreting sustainability assessment, and pluralism in values, interest and expectations by stakeholders.
The third part examines current practice in different contexts: Western Australia, Canada, England and South Africa. To this purpose, a framework for comparing sustainability assessment practice is developed. The framework, which I believe represents one of the most interesting contributions of this book, collates a number of different ideas for different categories of effectiveness criteria (from procedural to substantive, and from transactive to normative), consistently with the concept that a pluralism of approaches is needed. The framework is then applied to cross-comparing practices in the selected contexts, devoting a separate chapter to each of them. The consistency of the comparison, the use of illustrative case studies and the presence of a summary scorecard at the end of each chapter make this section of the book very informative and easy to follow. It is interesting to note that, even though the selected countries seem to be leading the way in the field, the authors acknowledge how this may be the effect of particularly active academic research that has framed practice in those countries as ‘sustainability assessment’. Hence, these contexts provide a clear picture of the diversity of current approaches, but not necessarily of the full breadth and depth of sustainability assessment undertakings worldwide. In other words, there might be more pluralism out there!
Finally, part four addresses key challenges and problems facing sustainability assessment, and proposes solutions to improve practice, which can be summarized as: better engagement (to accommodate the pluralism of view and values held by different stakeholders), better learning (to pervade the goals of individuals and institutions in activities beyond the isolated case in question), better processes (through principles that connect the various types of effectiveness) and better planning (through integrated planning and sustainability assessment processes).
In conclusion, the arguments underlying the need for pluralism in sustainability assessment are convincing, and the overview of the state of the art – including a short but compelling introduction by Robert Gibson – makes this book an inspiring source for students, scholars and practitioners. I particularly enjoyed the final chapters on possible solutions, which are well structured and convey clear messages. They prove that the authors mean it when they say that, after all, ‘sustainability assessment is intended to change things’.
© 2013, Davide Geneletti