10.3.2.1 Decision-making Process Related to Sustainable Development
Actions that steer the course of society and its economic and governmental
organizations are largely tasks of making decisions and solving problems. This
requires choosing issues that require attention, setting goals, finding or designing
suitable courses of action, and evaluating and choosing among alternative actions.
The first three of these activities—fixing agendas, setting goals, and
designing actions—are usually called problem solving; the last, evaluating
and choosing, is usually called decision making (Simon et al., 1986). Except
for trivial cases, decision making generally involves complicated processes
of setting actions and dynamic factors that begins with the identification of
a stimulus for action and ends with a specific commitment to action (Mintzberg,
1994). The complexity of the decision-making process related to sustainable
development becomes even more problematic simply because the difference between
the present state and a desired state is not clearly perceived, so “we
have a better understanding on what is unsustainable rather than what is sustainable”
(Fricker, 1998).
Much of the ambiguity arises from the lack of measurements that could provide
policymakers with essential information on the alternative choices at stake,
on how these choices affect clear and recognizable social, economic, and environmental
critical issues. Such measurements could also provide a basis for evaluating
policymakers’ performance in achieving goals and targets. Management requires
measurement and now, as never before, government institutions and the international
community are concerned with establishing the means to assess and report on
progress towards sustainable development. “If we genuinely embrace sustainable
development, we must have some idea if the path we are going on is heading towards
it or away from it. There is no way we can know that unless we know what it
is we are trying to achieve—i.e. what sustainable development means—and
unless we have indicators that tell us whether we are on or off a sustainable
development path” (Pearce, 1998). Therefore, indicators are indispensable
to make the concept of sustainable development operational. They are particularly
useful for decision making because they help (Hardi and Barg, 1997):
- understand what sustainable development means in operational terms (in this
sense, measurement and indicators are explanatory tools, which translate the
concepts of sustainable development into practical terms);
- make policy choices to move towards sustainable development (measurement
indicators create linkages between everyday activities, and sustainability
indicators provide a sense of direction for decision makers when they choose
among policy alternatives, that is they are planning tools); and
- decide how successful efforts to meet sustainable development goals and
objectives have been (in this sense measurement and indicators are performance
assessment tools).
The past few years have witnessed a rapidly increasing interest in the construction
of sustainable development indicators to assess the significance of sustainability
concerns in economic analysis and policy. Different analytical frameworks have
been suggested to identify, develop, and communicate indicators of sustainability.
Hardi and Barg (1997), in an extensive survey of ongoing work on measuring sustainability,
discuss the advantages and limitations of different approaches from the viewpoint
of their practical applicability. The main differences among frameworks are
(1) the ways and means by which they identify measurable dimensions, and select
and group the issues to be measured; and (2) the concepts by which they justify
the identification and selection procedure. Some of the major frameworks are
briefly summarized below.
One of the most prominent is the Human Development Index developed by the United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to ranks a country’s performance on
the criteria of human development, instead of solely the economic performance.
Though the index was not developed as a sustainable development index, recent
efforts have been made to supplement it with an environmental dimension to encompass
explicitly the multiple dimensions of sustainability. Integrated environmental–economic
accounting is a framework that is rapidly gaining prominence. The basic idea
of this approach is to establish links between the conventional circular production–consumption
economic accounting to the natural support system through the extraction of
resources in one direction and the discharge of residuals in the other (Tietenberg,
1996). Another framework that is attracting a high level of interest is the
multiple capital approach. This approach recognizes that a country’s wealth
is the combination of economic, environmental, and social capital and these
dimensions of capitals should be preserved, enriched, or substituted if consumed.
The World Bank’s Measure of the Wealth of Nations (World Bank, 1997)
is the most notable application of this framework. The concept of genuine savings
is introduced in the World Bank approach to measure the true rate of saving
of a nation after accounting for the depreciation of produced assets, the depletion
of natural resources, investments in human capital, and the value of global
damages from carbon emissions. Lastly, the Pressure–State–Response
framework (OECD,1993; UNCSD, 1996) focuses on the causal relationships between
stress-generating human activities, changes in the state of the natural and
social environment, and society responses to these changes through environmental,
general economic, and sectoral policies.
Different sets of thematic indicators are devised for use at different scales.
The broadest scale is the international or global level. In this context, global
conventions and protocols, such as the climate, biodiversity, desertification,
and ozone agreements, are extremely important. It is becoming increasingly clear
that unless specifically tailored indicators are developed and monitored, the
implementation of these conventions is not possible. Both the secretariats of
the conventions and international agencies are working intensely not only to
identify and develop appropriate indicators, but also, most importantly, to
give them acceptability in the eyes of the international community (Gallopin,
1997).
At the national level, several important steps to make operational the concept
of sustainable development have being undertaken. Different sets of thematic
indicators are being used for each of the major issues in national environmental
policy, reflecting differences in national endowment, level of development,
and cultural traditions, as well as the heterogeneity within countries. The
indicators generally cover every aspect of pollution control, nature conservation,
resource depletion, social welfare, health, education, employment, waste management,
etc.—in short, a compendium of all the components of traditional development
goals and conventional policy debate. Hence, factors that distinguish sustainable
development from traditional development tend to be submerged under a sea of
age-old problems that are made no more readily soluble by bearing the name sustainable
development (George, 1999). The point is that current definitions of indicators
and the use of terminology are particularly confusing and some clarity and consensus
is required about the definition of what an indicator is, as well as in the
definition of related concepts such as threshold, index, target, and standard.
This consensus cannot be based solely on political agreement; logical and epistemological
soundness is also necessary (Gallopin, 1997).
It is recognized (Hardi and Barg, 1997) that much work remains to be done.
Some approaches lack causal linkages or they tend to over simplify interlinkages
and relations among issues; others focus on the measurement of those segments
of sustainable development that can be expressed in monetary terms; in some
cases detailed calculations of indicators are highly technical and difficult
to handle. Fresh initiatives oriented to capture complex interlinkages in the
interactions between human activity and the environment, especially those related
to pressure–state–response causalities, have been undertaken in recent
years (Meadows, 1998; Bossel, 1999). Undoubtedly, all these efforts are needed
to provide decision makers with information and operational criteria to assess
current situations and evaluate strategic decisions. Furthermore, these efforts
hold the additional promise of treating environmental problems within a framework
that the key institutions and agencies in any government will understand.
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