1. Sustainability Assessment

Sustainability assessment (SA) has emerged in the last decades as a diversified field of theory and practice. Its purpose is seeking to assess situations marked by the complexity of sustainability issues.

 
The objectives of sustainability assessment can be diverse: evaluation of a past or future project, planning, decision-making, conflict-resolution, or collective deliberation. Most real-life situations or projects are marked by complexity, uncertainty and the plurality of perspectives, and thus require a type of assessment that can deal with those features..
 
As a practice, sustainability assessment underlines the importance of developing operational skills for articulating and negotiating challenges of building common futures that reconcile potentially competing claims to be sustained. No sustainability assessment exercise can pretend to lead to a univocal result, as the theory of social choice has shown.
 
SA has to take into account not only “facts”, but also “values”, asking what ought to be protected, sustained or developed (John Forrester). Thus, in sustainability assessment, integrating divergent issues and values is to be considered as a process and as an ambition to be pursued through reflexivity and public dialogue — which is what can be called also deliberation.

Methods for Sustainability Assessment

Following Gasparatos and Scolobig (2012), we can identify sustainability assessment tools categories according to the assumptions that they carry, mainly in the following orders:

(a) the valuation perspective of the overall assessment;

(b) the adoption of a reductionist or non-reductionist perspective during the assessment;

(c) the acceptability of trade-offs between the different sustainability issues.

The following table shows the 3 main categories of tools identified and their most common examples:

Sustainability Assessment Tools

from Gasparatos and Scolobig (2012)

 

Monetary tools, biophysical tools and indicator-based tools have different uses, which we will explore in the next grains of this module. 

To go further (in theory)

SA can be considered as a post-normal technology, with reference to the post-normal practice of science and knowledge quality assessment, to evoke classes of decision situations where uncertainties are large, the stakes are high, and values diverge.

Two limits in the decision support ideals of modernity, that justify SA, relate first to measurement, the second to participation and conflict resolution. Retaking the distinction between “means and ends”, there is on the one hand, the impossibility of exact measurement (quantification) of “opportunity costs” associated with environmental policy choices in relation to, on the other hand, a plurality of (incomparable) values to be sustained.

Social choice theory has been developed by Arrow (1950) and Sen (1970) and is substantively anchored in the contemporary distributional dilemmas of environmental change and risk in the short and the long terms.