Assessing Social Sustainability

The social dimension of sustainable development has most often been neglected when developing future scenarios, or, at best, been dealt with as a framework condition for successful environmental sustainability strategies. However, given the long-disputed trade-off between social and environmental improvements in a market economy, environmental and social criteria must be developed and incorporated to scenario design from the very beginning and on equal footing, if a bias of the results violating the basic concept of sustainable development is to be avoided. The scenario presented reflects such integrative approach, including social sustainability criteria from the very offset. In social science, so far no consensus has emerged on what are the adequate criteria for social sustainability. Consequently, each project derives its own set of indicators and criteria specific to the research question analysed, but rarely applicable on the macro level of societies' social sustainability. For any such more general approach it is necessary to integrate criteria of different quality, and to pay due respect to their importance attributed to them by various stakeholders. Standard evaluation methodologies are not capable of handling this situation, in particular the need to simultaneously take a variety of objectives into account, the lack of a common numeraire, and the fact that no unambiguous optimum exists in multi-dimensional optimisation, but only a range of acceptable solutions can be defined. Multicriteria evaluation provides an alternative in these cases. It is applied to the scenario, first in a narrative manner, then by applying an ordinal scale for measurement. The social sustainability of the scenario is evaluated as "good, but not perfect", including a sensitivity analysis. To make sure that this result is not a methodological artefact based on using the same criteria for project development and evaluation, other social sustainability criteria from different literature sources are applied to the scenario in another multicriteria evaluation. The assessment turns out to be stable even with this extended set of criteria.