Sustainability Indicators

Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online's data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. 1. Introduction Imagine a situation where, after debating for years on what makes you happy, you finally decide that it is about time you start put these ideas into practice and effectively make yourself happy(ier). If you are really determined, you will be keen to stop convincing yourself that you are happy if you are not: you will want to check whether you are really making progress towards achieving your goals. You will have identified different components of your happiness and will assess some of them, progressing cautiously, step by step. You will also be aware of the links between these components, links that determine your overall state of happiness. In the situation described above, now replace the term 'happiness' by that of 'sustainability'-like concepts such as justice, truth, or happiness indeed, it is a desirable objective, albeit difficult to capture in a concise, shared, definition. The situation you are now looking at describes pretty well the context within which debates on sustainability indicators are now taking place. For decades, we have worked hard at defining, in more and more precise ways, what sustainability means. These debates have been of such a conceptual nature that 'the term sustainability, like any other suddenly fashionable phrases, has been misunderstood and misused with increasing frequency. Even worse, it has been used to misinform so as to gain advantage for narrow and special interests' (Munro, 1995:27). We have sometimes been kidding ourselves that we are not doing that badly in managing the interactions between our human and ecological systems. In other cases, we have sensed that our ways of living are very unsustainable but we haven't been able to change our practices and move towards more sustainable ones. The development of 'indicators of sustainability', perceived as a first step towards the operationalisation of the concept, has reflected a pro-active initiative to make a change, itself fired up by a real sense of urgency: "sustainability [becomes] meaningless unless we can do it" (Bell and Morse, 1999:5). It all started in 1992, when the Rio Summit established a mandate for the United Nations to formulate a set of indicators that would help gauge progress towards sustainability. Although the …