Sustainability appraisal: a sourcebook and reference guide to international experience

Sustainability Appraisal: A Sourcebook and Reference Guide to International Experience by Barry Dalal-Clayton and Barry Sadler has had a gestation period of more than 10 years. The long wait for the book to appear in print is finally over, and the key question is: has it been worth the wait?

Barry and Barry are well equipped to write such a book as their joint experience covers many years and a wide variety of sustainability-related activities across different sectors and in different parts of the world. They are amongst the very early pioneers of sustainability assessment, or as they prefer to call it, sustainability appraisal. Given the ambitious aim of the book to provide a stocktake of sustainability appraisal experience, they have very sensibly sought contributions from a large number of international practitioners and researchers. The resulting book is a tour de force at 852 pages.

The book opens with an introductory chapter in which key terms are defined and key concepts explained. Sustainability appraisal is described rather than defined in this section, opening the way for a very broad range of processes (ex-ante and ex-post, and applied at scales ranging from a business to the global level) to be subsequently discussed. Perhaps the clearest definition comes in the concluding chapter, where sustainability appraisal is described as ‘a generic process to evaluate progress toward sustainable development across all three pillars and against agreed policy goals and criteria’ (p. 669), where the three pillars are of course the familiar environmental, social and economic dimensions of the common conceptualisation of sustainability (or sustainable development) which the authors argue to retain for its practicality despite the many critiques directed at it. The chapter succeeds in introducing what follows, though I was disappointed to find so many self-references and so little meaningful engagement with others' thinking on the subject of sustainability assessment, in particular as documented in the 2013 edited book Sustainability Assessment: Pluralism, Practice and Progress (Bond et al., 2013) and Gibson's seminal work Sustainability Assessment: Criteria and Processes (Gibson et al., 2005).

Chapter 2 provides a useful overview of the evolution of the sustainable development discourse with a focus at the global level. It is argued that since most countries have sustainable development policies and goals of some sort that are derived from these global principles, that these should form the basis of sustainability appraisal practice. Actually, many of the examples of sustainability appraisal provided in the book are at a much smaller scale of localities or projects, and it is often hard to see the link between the sustainability frameworks developed for these applications and the global agenda. Perhaps a broader discussion of what sustainable development means at different scales would have been a useful addition here, particularly as sustainable development seems to have fallen off the public policy agenda in many parts of the world as conservative governments have responded to the global financial crisis. Chapter 3 completes the introductory section by discussing the concept and practice of integration within sustainability appraisal.

Three long chapters comprise Part 2 of the book, one each on environmental, economic and social-based approaches to (or dimensions of) sustainability appraisal. This seems a little odd in itself, given the emphasis on Part 1 on integrated consideration across the three pillars. The environmental chapter (Chapter 4) is largely descriptive, mirroring Chapter 2 but with a focus on international discourse on the environment and biodiversity. The economic chapter (Chapter 5) largely discusses attempts to integrate environmental (but not social) considerations into economic tools through valuation techniques. The social chapter (Chapter 6), focused heavily on the practices of social impact assessment (SIA) and health impact assessment (HIA), seems very out of date with few references dated later than the mid-2000s despite the plethora of recent work in both these areas. A very notable omission is any mention of the 2011 publication New Directions in Social Impact Assessment: Conceptual and Methodological Advances (Vanclay & Esteves 2011), although the chapter does make reference to the relatively recent and rapidly emerging field of human rights impact assessment. While it may not be reasonable to expect a comprehensive overview of SIA and HIA in a book such as this, the limited nature of the discussion, combined with the non-integrated and somewhat uneven nature of these three chapters leaves me questioning the value of including them at all.

Part 3 includes two chapters on country experiences with sustainability appraisal in selected developed and developing countries, respectively. These are interesting, and I know from my own involvement in the process that attempts were made to keep these chapters up to date and to refresh them as soon as possible prior to publication. Yet, despite this, they are already dated. So they best serve as a stocktake or record of past practice, a point that is also made by the authors in the concluding chapter where they acknowledge the challenge of keeping the book reasonably current over a decade. The same applies to the four chapters in Section 4, which consider sustainability appraisal in four different sectors: natural resources and land use; business, industry and infrastructure; urban development; and trade liberalisation policies. The book closes with a concluding chapter entitled ‘Retrospect and prospect’, which I have to say I did not find very useful or enlightening.

So does the book succeed? As a snapshot or stocktake of sustainability appraisal practice, it is very impressive. But is this in itself a useful thing? The authors make it clear that it was never their intent to critique the various approaches presented or to synthesis them in any way, and the result is an overwhelming grab bag of material (countless frameworks, sets of principles and case study descriptions) with very little to help the reader make sense of it. As the very minimum, it would have been good to see much better cross-referencing between sections: for example, the Global Reporting Initiative is described and discussed in three different places in the book, with no cross-references between the three at all. As another example, perhaps linking signposts could have been provided from the typology of integration techniques on p. 105 to where these are discussed in the book. Similarly, some potentially useful tools and pieces of research (e.g. the MATISSE project and the Sustainability A-Test) are described in the relevant chapter of country experiences (in this case, the EU) rather than in a general section where they might be more easily found and made use of.

So I find myself wondering how I might use this book in the future. If I were new to sustainability appraisal looking for guidance on how to go about it, I would not know where to start looking for it in this book. As an experienced practitioner who has some idea of the state of play in various parts of the world, I will probably find it useful to check up on details and references to things I am already aware of. I certainly would not cite it as a current representation of the state of global practice, and cannot see myself going back to the chapters on economic and social sustainability again. On the other hand, it may well become my first reference point for an overview of the global sustainability agenda (Chapter 2), international environmental law and policy (Chapter 4) and the sustainability-related activities of the UN and other agencies (Chapter 8).

In summary, the authors are to be congratulated for their achievement. I believe that there is value in it, and I hope that as a global community we may eventually be able to build on this foundation and move to the next stage of drawing solid lessons and conclusions from what is clearly a rich and diverse body of practice in sustainability appraisal.