ABSTRACT
In our various writings during the first decade of the twenty-first century on sustainability indicators (SIs), our goal was to take a systemic approach to understanding sustainability measurement. We had read many books and papers on SIs, some of which date to the late 1980s, but we were not entirely satisfied with what we had found. Our reading spanned an eclectic range of SIs, including ecological concepts such as the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) for fisheries, which is still in use and indeed forms part of the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) released by the United Nations (UN) in early 2016, as well as other, well-established indicators, such as the Shannon-Wiener index of biodiversity (H). We also covered SI frameworks, such as the AMOEBA framework, developed by Dutch researchers for assessing the sustainability of the North Sea, and wrote about it in a form that would appeal to non-specialists. We reviewed the development of SIs as part of the concept of sustainable cities and communities during the early to mid-1990s, of which there were many following the release of Local Agenda 21, which came out of the Rio 1992 conference. “Sustainable Seattle” was perhaps the best-known example at the time that this chapter was originally written, in the late 1990s, but the integration of sustainability and SIs into municipal planning has now spread throughout the world. We were also intrigued by the growing use of SIs as a means to help achieve what were called “sustainable institutions,” and these were largely based on microfinance as a means to help achieve sustainable development. Microfinance gained a great deal of attention following the first Microcredit Summit held in 1997, and was being strongly promoted by its adherents, almost as a “silver bullet,” as the sustainable way forward in sustainable development. Here the indicators were designed to monitor dependency of such institutions on continuing donations from aid organizations with the ultimate intention of eliminating such funding and encouraging the institution to fend for itself and live off the interest gained from microcredit. It presented an apparent win-win in development terms with the resource poor of the world gaining access to finance to help them improve the basis for their livelihood and institutions that would gradually lessen their dependence on funds from the developed world. The example we covered was the Subsidy Dependence Index (SDI) created by the World Bank. Finally, we were fascinated by the emergence and promise of the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) in the late 1990s; the first attempt that we were aware 188of to develop global rankings of nation-state environmental sustainability based upon a complex set of indicators, data transformation and aggregation methods.
