Key Message

Looking beyond the current diversity of practice, it is important to identify common patterns in the initiatives dealing with the assessment and measurement of progress towards sustainability.

Measuring and Assessing Progress

Identifying approaches, patterns and practices

There are far more indicators and assessment practitioners at work today than ever before. Private sector and public organizations generate a rapidly growing amount and diversity of information on economic trends, social dynamics and environmental conditions.

The growing intensity of work in this area and the massive amount of information already produced presents opportunities and challenges. Looking beyond the current diversity of practice, it is important to identify common patterns in the initiatives dealing with the assessment and measurement of progress towards sustainability. Over time, this may result in better harmonized indicator sets and, perhaps even more important, improved co-ordination among measurement and assessment processes. Finding out what works and what doesn't in measurement and assessment is essential for learning to do them better.

In 1996, in cooperation with a group of leading international practitioners, IISD developed general guidelines for the practical assessment toward sustainable development, commonly known as the Bellagio Principles. Subsequently adopted by several field projects, the Bellagio Principles identify desirable common patterns in sustainable development-related assessments.

Sustainability indicators need to reflect systemic interactions between environment and, as a starting point, require conceptual frameworks that reflect these. In Indicators for Sustainable Development: Theory, Method, Applications (PDF - 709), author Dr. Hartmut Bossel, former Director and Professor Emeritus at the Environmental Sensitivities Research Institute in Kassel, Germany, and Balaton Group member, emphasizes the need for a systems-thinking-based approach. He illustrates that leading indices, most prominently the gross domestic product (GDP), are inadequate as universal measures of progress and introduces the "orientor approach" to sustainable development indicators.

Nearly a decade after the Bellagio Principles were published, and as co-ordinated indicator systems have become more prevalent, IISD was commissioned by the United Nations Division for Sustainable Development to conduct a review of current trends in the development and use of SD indicators. SD Indicators: Proposals for the Way Forward (PDF - 659 kb) also offers strategic options for future indicator development. Among others, it recommends advancing a capital-based approach to indicators and co-ordination of indicator efforts with underlying statistical systems, particularly the integrated System of Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA).

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