The social fabric of Jeans’: Assessing the social: Coupling social simulation and assessment methods

The culture and manufacturing of the cotton fabric used to make your Jeans’ may have implied the use of fertilizers or pesticides polluting a water basin, have led to relocating people and even of children labour at different stages of its fabrication. As a consumer you probably didn’t take all these consequences into account (for your sake most of the information is not available, or value-wise you feel unconcerned) and you surely preferred to buy the cheapest one or to follow the fashion trend. Basically, every economic or public activity has repercussions directly, or through a chain of consequences on the environment and the society. In order to try and measure those impacts, or to valuate one choice (Jeans’ L) compared to another (Jeans’ P&J), several assessment methods have been developed and are frequently used. As a self-evident truth, assessment methods are instruments used to evaluate something. These could include measuring a performance on a specific case. In terms of evaluating policies and strategies, their possible outcomes are intended to evaluate their potential impacts. This refers to impact assessment in which past (already implemented actions) or future (ex-ante analysis) performances are studied. Such assessment methods have proliferated in the last decade. Via an Internet search, Vanclay (2004) identified over 100 types of impact assessment, although many are not intended as major forms of assessment. Physical assessment (e.g. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)), monetary assessment (e.g. Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA)), scenario analysis (tools with prospective character), multi-criteria analysis, Integrated Assessment, Triple BottomLine Assessment, Sustainability Assessment, Extended Impact Assessment, Multi-Criteria Analysis, Risk Assessment tools, are used in the literature to promote the use of impact assessment as a means of directing planning and decision-making towards sustainable development. Facing this huge literature, Dalal-Clayton and Sadler (2004) judiciously observe that “the alphabet soup of acronyms and terms currently makes for a confusing picture”. There have been also a considerable number of comparisons of these assessment methods (Lee et al., 2003; Eales and Twigger-Ross, 2003; Rorarius, 2007; Hacking and Guthrie, 2008). This is also one of the aims of the MATISSE (Methods and Tools for Integrated Sustainability Assessment (ISA)) project, funded by the European Commission, which seeks to examine ISA's possibilities for the process of developing and implementing policies for a more sustainable Europe. In this project the main task is to develop, test and demonstrate new and improved methods and tools for conducting ISA. The main problem when you have to choose one method among the others is that each rests upon several assumptions (time horizon considered, which externalities are the most important, operationalization...) and is limited to a particular aspect and, either concerning