Regional sustainability: How useful are current tools of sustainability assessment at the regional scale?

Sustainability assessment methods are primarily aimed at global, national or state scales. However, modelling sustainability at finer spatial scales, such as the region, is essential for understanding and achieving sustainability. Regions are emerging as an essential focus for sustainability researchers, natural resource managers and strategic planners working to develop and implement sustainability goals. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of current sustainability assessment methods - ecological footprint, wellbeing assessment, ecosystem health assessment, quality of life and natural resource availability - at the regional scale. Each of these assessment methods are tested using South East Queensland (SEQ) as a case study. It was selected because of its ecological and demographic diversity, its combination of coastal and land management issues, and its urban metropolitan and rural farm and non-farm communities. The applicability of each of these methods to regional assessment was examined using an evaluation criteria matrix, which describes the attributes of an effective method and the characteristics that make these methods useful for regional management and building community capacity to progress sustainability. We found that the methods tested failed to effectively measure progress toward sustainability at the regional scale, demonstrating the need for a new method for assessing regional sustainability.     

The inherent dangers of using computable general equilibrium models as a single integrated modelling framework for sustainability impact assessment. A critical note on Böhringer and Löschel (2006)

The search for methods of assessment that best evaluate and integrate the trade-offs and interactions between the economic, environmental and social components of development has been receiving a new impetus due to the requirement that sustainability concerns be incorporated into the policy formulation process. A paper forthcoming in Ecological Economics [Böhringer, C., Löschel, A., in press. Computable general equilibrium models for sustainability impact assessment: status quo and prospects, Ecological Economics.] claims that Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models may potentially represent the much needed “back-bone” tool to carry out reliable integrated quantitative Sustainability Impact Assessments (SIAs). While acknowledging the usefulness of CGE models for some dimensions of SIA, this commentary questions the legitimacy of employing this particular economic modelling tool as a single integrating modelling framework for a comprehensive evaluation of the multi-dimensional, dynamic and complex interactions between policy and sustainability. It discusses several inherent dangers associated with the advocated prospects for the CGE modelling approach to contribute to comprehensive and reliable sustainability impact assessments. The paper warns that this reductionist viewpoint may seriously infringe upon the basic values underpinning the SIA process, namely a transparent, heterogeneous, balanced, inter-disciplinary, consultative and participatory take to policy evaluation and building of the evidence-base.     

Envisioning sustainability: Recent progress in the use of participatory backcasting approaches for sustainability research

This paper describes recent progress in the utilization of participatory scenario-based backcasting approaches to sustainability research that blend quantitative and qualitative analyses in order to explore alternative climate change futures, as undertaken in a range of academic, government, and private sector projects in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, Canada. These projects reveal that buy-in to policy proposals may be enhanced by participation, but there is a risk of participants being overwhelmed by the complexity of the choices they are being asked to make. Furthermore, tools are grounded in a process, which must itself be the explicit focus of attention in designing successful backcasting projects and combining participatory backcasting techniques with more interactive processes that can enhance our ability to explore highly complex and uncertain, value-laden issues. These approaches can be used to drive action and support decision-making, but for a truly consultative and consensus-oriented process to occur, it is important that a broad sample of the community be engaged in the discussion that are equipped with technical knowledge or understanding of the goals of the process in order to participate in an equitable and effective fashion.     

The sustainability and transition of economic growth in China：from a perspective of factor structure

After more than 20 years＇ high speed growth, the sustainable growth of Chinese economy faces serious limitation of resources and factors now and in the future. In order to maintain the economic growth. China has to trans-form the way of economic growth, Based on the analysis on the related theories of economic growth and the structural transformation in factors of production, this paper proposes that the transformation of the economic growth way has to impel the optimization and the promotion of the utilization structure of factors of production. Finall.v, based on the analysis of the necessity to change the pattern of economic growth, this paper proposes＇ the strategic measures to promote the continuous economic growth and the transformation of patterns of economic growth.     

Environmental rationalities and the development state in East Asia: Prospects for a sustainability transition

This paper reviews what is known about recent trends in environmental governance among the newly industrializing countries of East Asia and the implications of these developments for a sustainability transition within the region. The conceptual starting point for the review is research that examines sustainability transitions within the framework of a multi-level perspective on system innovation. One of the challenges presented by this framework is that of understanding how existing political economies and governance structures promote stability or change in socio-technical regimes. By socio-technical regimes we mean the predominant organizational, social and technological configurations through which societal needs are constituted and met. In the case of the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing economies of East Asia, the trajectory of socio-technical regimes will have profound consequences for local, regional and global environments. Our review of trends in environmental governance as they relate to socio-technical regimes within the region traces a pattern of initial efforts to strengthen environmental regulatory regimes very much along the lines of the policy models of OECD economies. The degree to which these initial efforts have taken root varies from country to country in the region. What is beginning to emerge in several countries within the region, however, are a variety of policy and institutional innovations that hold promise for opening up spaces for change in socio-technical regimes, and for creating opportunities for new pathways of industrialization and urbanization to take hold that are less pollution, materials and energy-intensive.     

Environmental regulations and the problem of sustainability: Moving beyond “market failure”

The standard metaphor of market failure is an impediment to the crafting of environmental policy that can escape policy lock in. Sustainability requires a policy process that can avoid this lock in. Sustainability concerns the creation of dynamic human processes that can respond to—indeed anticipate—unanticipated feedback from biological processes.     

Sustaining sustainability science: The role of established inter-disciplines

The establishment of new interdisciplinary fields such as ecological economics, human ecology or technology assessment can be interpreted as a logical consequence of striving for new sustainability sciences that address current global, multi-dimensional and multi-scale challenges. These set out to bridge the gap between the natural and the social sphere, between scientific analysis and societal action. This paper aims at re-assessing the contribution of established inter-disciplines to sustainable development. Journal articles of ecological economics, technology assessment and science and technology studies are evaluated and compared along several proposed features of sustainability science. The results converge in two crucial aspects. (1) Concise societal or political recommendations are not part of present day ‘normal science’, be it a disciplinary or an explicitly interdisciplinary research context. (2) Participatory exercises are rarely applied as a socio-politically embedded practice, despite a high interest in such exercises as an object of study and discussion.     

The sustainability of Portuguese fiscal policy from a historical perspective

This paper analyses the sustainability of Portuguese public finances, making use of a long dataset with more than a full century of observations. The use of such a long dataset is appropriate because both the unit root and co-integration tests on which the sustainability testing procedure is based require a long period of data. We find considerable evidence in favor of sustainability for the 1903–2003 period which is not, however, maintained for the more recent 1975–2003 period, as it is characterized by the largest GDP deficit ratios of our sample. This latter period appears to signal a shift to an unsustainable path in Portuguese fiscal policy. Hence, our results suggest that fiscal consolidation efforts must, in fact, be continued in Portugal.Paper presented at the 2004 CESifo-LBI Conference on “Sustainability of Public Debt”, October 22–23 2004, Munich.     

An exercise in composite indicators construction: Assessing the sustainability of Italian regions

This paper presents a piece of research aimed at evaluating the relative sustainability of the Italian Regions. After selecting a core set of indicators, for which we referred to the EU Sustainable Development Strategy, we built a composite index and checked for its robustness. As a result we got ‘many numbers’, that is, a range of possible rankings for Italian Regions.     

Dynamic sustainability assessment: The case of Russia in the period of transition (1985-2008)

Russia has experienced twenty years of economic and social change, which had a substantial impact on the regional and sectoral patterns of the development of its economy, infrastructure, the quality of the environment and the well-being of its people. The current economic revival offers new opportunities and presents new challenges for the sustainable development of Russia.The paper employs the UN Sustainable Development framework of indicators and assesses sustainability of Russia using multi-criteria evaluation methods, namely the uncertainty randomization multi-criteria evaluation method “Analysis and Synthesis of Parameters under Information Deficiency” (ASPID). The analysis covers economic, environmental and social trends in Russia's development in 1985-2008 and assesses sustainability of this development from the point of view of multiple criteria.The results show the potential of employment of multi-criteria methods for the sustainability assessment at the macro level and offer useful insights into multidimensional nature of sustainability and the role of priority setting in the evaluation process. Such an analysis reveals the degree of harmoniousness of sustainable development policy. It shows how different sets of priorities determine the outcome of multidimensional analysis of sustainability and could potentially help in assessing progress and designing new policy instruments. This paper is one of the first to apply multi-criteria methods to the macro sustainability analysis in the dynamic setting.     

Enabling sustainability transitions in Asia: The importance of vertical and horizontal linkages

The phrase “sustainable development” appears increasingly in national policies in Asian countries and there are many successful ‘sustainability experiments’ documented at local level throughout the region. We explore why, despite the efforts made at the national level and the good practices at local level, underlying trends are away from sustainability. Drawing on the multi-level perspective on system innovation, we argue that linkages between different levels in socio-technical systems are critical to explaining the emergence of sustainable development pathways. The absence of these linkages in many Asian contexts is an important factor obstructing sustainability transitions in Asia. We argue that while the importance of vertical linkages is recognized and theorized in the multi-level perspective, the horizontal and the temporal dimensions are under-explored. We develop a set of propositions for exploring linkages in socio-technical systems, supporting these with empirical examples from the region.     

Maximising sustainability of Dutch dairy farming systems for different stakeholders: A modelling approach

A multi-attribute sustainability function is included into a dairy farm LP-model by using Weighted Goal Programming. The created Weighted Linear Goal Programming (WLGP)-model is used to maximise sustainability of different Dutch dairy farming systems and to analyse the impact of: (1) maximisation of individual sustainability aspects (economic, social and ecological sustainability) and (2) maximisation of overall sustainability using stakeholder preferences. Maximising the individual aspects of both dairy farming systems, i.e. conventional and organic, shows the trade-offs between different aspects of sustainability. For conventional as well as organic dairy farming maximum scores are highest for external social sustainability. The conventional dairy farm achieves a slightly higher score for overall sustainability than the organic dairy farm for all stakeholders (i.e. consumers and producers). This shows that it is possible for conventional dairy farms, similar to the conventional farm used in the analysis especially regarding the stocking density and under Dutch policy conditions, to achieve equal sustainability scores in comparison with organic dairy farms. It is concluded that the WLGP model is a suitable tool to analyse the sustainability of different dairy farming systems.     

Urban and rural attitudes toward municipal water controls: A study of a semi-arid region with limited water supplies

This study addresses the effectiveness of using pricing mechanisms, government-imposed constraints, or a hybrid, as a means of rationing municipal water. We try to test which policies would be most accepted among rural and urban communities in a semi-arid region of Texas that depend on both surface and groundwater sources for their municipal supplies. This study reveals that a hybrid conservation policy that includes mandatory restrictions, fines for overuse, and pricing increases could be more acceptable, and hence more efficient, than a policy that only consists of regulation. Moreover, there is not a significant dichotomy in policy preferences between rural and urban constituents; although those in rural communities would seem to appreciate far less regulatory policy than would urbanites.     

Conceptual niche management of grassroots innovation for sustainability: The case of body disposal practices in the UK

The grassroots has recently been identified as an alternative site for the development of innovations that may contribute to shifts towards more sustainable systems of consumption and production. While the characteristics of these innovations have been elaborated, it remains unclear how these alternative ideas and practices can be purposively supported to populate incumbent systems. This is especially so in light of the difficulty the grassroots face in connecting forcefully with the mainstream.This article will address this issue by outlining an adaptation of conceptual niche management - an approach that focuses on the embedding of guiding principles used to fulfill basic societal needs - that is sensitive to grassroots innovation. The framework will be applied to the current UK body disposal system to illustrate how such transformative sustainability ideas may be capitalised on.     

Dynamic multidimensional assessment of sustainability at the macro level: The case of Austria

This paper explores the issue of sustainability at the macro scale employing multi-criteria decision aid (MCDA) methods. The incommensurability of values and the essentially multi-dimensional and dynamic nature of sustainability challenge the use of composite measurement indices. This determined the choice of MCDA methods. Austria was chosen as a case study, due to the wide availability of data, especially on indicators of strong sustainability. The structure of the multi-criteria problem comprised the evolution of different sustainability dimensions over time. The process for selecting criteria included a critical assessment of institutional sustainability agendas (UN, EU and Austrian Government) and theoretical recommendations.After an assessment of MCDA methods, the NAIADE method demonstrated the most suitable properties for sustainability assessment. The application of this outranking approach was undertaken in three separate settings: long-term from 1960 to 2003, medium-term, 1970-1995, and short-term, 1995-2003 with varying numbers of criteria. The response of results to the addition of evaluating criteria and periods was tested. The degree of credibility for accepting preference relations was also employed for sensitivity analysis.According to the results of long-term and medium-term assessments, especially in the weak sustainability setting, sustainable progress is taking place in Austria. In the short term, in the stronger sustainability setting and, especially as the number of criteria increases, more incomparable periods appear and trends are less determined. Moreover, it is shown how results crucially depend on the methodological choices.This is one of the first applications of the multi-criteria tools to the dynamic analysis of sustainability at the macro scale.     

Sustainability of nations by indices: Comparative study between environmental sustainability index, ecological footprint and the emergy performance indices

The present work makes a comparison between the two most used environmental sustainability indices of nations: “ecological footprint” and “environmental sustainability index”, with two emergy ratios (renewability and emergy sustainability index). All of them are gaining space within the scientific community and government officials. Despite the efforts for obtaining an index that adequately represents the sustainability of a region, according to the result of this research, nowadays there is not yet a completely satisfactory index. We consider that all of them need to be improved, but the results point out the possibility of obtaining one better index of sustainability through the junction of ecological footprint with renewability emergy index.     

A new method for assessing the sustainability of land-use systems (II): Evaluating impact indicators

In the past decade, numerous indicators and indicator sets for sustainable agriculture and sustainable land management have been proposed. In addition to their interest in comparing different management systems on an indicator by indicator basis, land managers are often interested in comparing individual indicators against a threshold, or, in order to study trade-offs, against each other. To this end it is necessary to (1) transform the original indicators into a comparable format, and (2) score these transformed indicators against a sustainability function.This paper introduces an evaluation method for land-use-related impact indicators, which was designed to accomplish these tasks. It is the second of a series of two papers, and as such it links into a larger framework for sustainability assessment of land use systems.The evaluation scheme introduced here comprises (1) a standardisation procedure, which aims at making different indicators comparable. In this procedure indicators are first normalised, by referencing them to the total impact they contribute towards, and then they are corrected by a factor describing the severity of this total impact in terms of exceeding a threshold. The procedure borrows conceptually from Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Impact Analysis methodology; (2) a valuation procedure, which judges the individual standardised indicators with regard to sustainability.This methodology is then tested on an indicator set for the environmental impact of a spinach production system in Northwest Germany. The method highlights mineral resource consumption, greenhouse gas emission, eutrophication and impacts on soil quality as the most important environmental effects of the studied system.We then explore the effect of introducing weighting factors, reflecting the differing societal perception of diverse environmental issues. Two different sets of weighting factors are used. The influence of weighting is, however, small compared to that of the standardisation procedure introduced earlier.Finally, we explore the propagation of uncertainty (defined as a variable's 95% confidence limits) throughout the standardisation procedure using a stochastic simulation approach. The uncertainty of the analysed standardised indicator was higher than that of the non-standardised indicators by a factor of 2.0 to 2.5.     

Relating the philosophy and practice of ecological economics: The role of concepts, models, and case studies in inter- and transdisciplinary sustainability research

We develop a general and unifying methodology for ecological economics which integrates philosophical considerations on the foundations of ecological economics with an adequate operationalization. We argue that the subject matter and aims of ecological economics require a specific combination of inter- and transdisciplinary research, and discuss the epistemological position on which this methodology is based. In accordance with this understanding of inter- and transdisciplinarity and the underlying epistemological position, we develop an operationalization which comprises simultaneous analysis on three levels of abstraction: concepts, (generic) models and case studies. This provides a systematic and integral view on ecological economics, and thus allows one to see the relationship between contributions to the field that have so far been perceived as very heterogeneous and largely unrelated. At the same time, this methodological framework may provide orientation for the further development of ecological economics.     

Institutional Resource Regimes: Towards sustainability through the combination of property-rights theory and policy analysis

Although the concept of sustainable development is gaining increasing political acknowledgement, despite the implementation of environmental policies specifically intended to solve problems in this area, environmental degradation resulting from the recurrent problems associated with the over-exploitation of natural resources remains an important concern for most countries. How can this situation be explained? This article postulates that a combination of approaches from the political sciences (in particular policy analysis) and institutional economics would enable the identification of the most relevant regulatory dimensions which can explain the (un)sustainable uses of resources. Based on this starting point, it develops an innovative theoretical framework, i.e. that of the Institutional Resource Regime (IRR).The adopted approach facilitates the analysis of the regulatory measures and resource management practices associated with complex and competitive heterogeneous use situations from a perspective of sustainability. Indeed, the two dimensions of “extent” and “coherence” enable the definition and categorization of the IRR of a given resource. The extent of an IRR refers to the total number of goods and services in use that are actually regulated by the regime at a given time, while the coherence measures the degree of coordination of the various user-actors within the regime. One of the major contributions of the IRR framework is its ability to describe the different configurations of regimes, both theoretically and empirically, and to predict their effect on the sustainability of a resource based on the hypothesis that high levels of regime extent and coherence are necessary preconditions for sustainability.By doing this, the IRR framework also enables the analysis of the actual use rights to the goods and services provided by resources as the result of the political strategies of actors who mobilize different legal provisions, which stem either from formal property rights to resources or from policies that regulate the use and protection of these resources.Having developed the central research hypotheses and the empirical research procedure, we present the lessons drawn from the first campaign of field research which was mainly conducted in Switzerland from 1999. Based on the evidence from these initial findings, it is suggested that the scope of the IRR framework could be far broader than evidenced by its application in the case of Switzerland where it was initially developed.