Sustainability assessment is being increasingly viewed as an important tool to aid in the shift towards sustainability. However, this is a new and evolving concept and there remain very few examples of effective sustainability assessment processes implemented anywhere in the world. Sustainability assessment is often described as a process by which the implications of an initiative on sustainability are evaluated, where the initiative can be a proposed or existing policy, plan, programme, project, piece of legislation, or a current practice or activity. However, this generic definition covers a broad range of different processes, many of which have been described in the literature as 'sustainability assessment'. This article seeks to provide some clarification by reflecting on the different approaches described in the literature as being forms of sustainability assessment, and evaluating them in terms of their potential contributions to sustainability. Many of these are actually examples of 'integrated assessment', derived from environmental impact assessment (EIA) and strategic environmental assessment (SEA), but which have been extended to incorporate social and economic considerations as well as environmental ones, reflecting a 'triple bottom line' (TBL) approach to sustainability. These integrated assessment processes typically either seek to minimise 'unsustainability', or to achieve TBL objectives. Both aims may, or may not, result in sustainable practice. We present an alternative conception of sustainability assessment, with the more ambitious aim of seeking to determine whether or not an initiative is actually sustainable. We term such processes 'assessment for sustainability'. 'Assessment for sustainability' firstly requires that the concept of sustainability be well-defined. The article compares TBL approaches and principles-based approaches to developing such sustainability criteria, concluding that the latter are more appropriate, since they avoid many of the inherent limitations of the triple-bottom-line as a conception of sustainability.

Conceptualising sustainability assessment

In 2017, the Journal of Knowledge Management (JKM) celebrates its 20th anniversary. This study aims to show an updated analysis of their publications to provide a general overview of the journal, focusing on a bibliometric analysis of its publications between 1997 and 2016.,The methodology involves two procedures: a performance analysis and a science mapping analysis of JKM. The performance analysis uses a series of bibliometric indicators such as h-index, productivity and citations. This analysis considers different dimensions, including papers, authors, universities and countries. VOSviewer software is used to carry out the mapping of science of JKM, which, based on the concurrence of key words and co-citation points of view, seeks to graphically analyze the structure of the references of this journal.,There is a positive evolution in the number of publications (although with certain oscillations), which shows a growing interest in publishing in JKM. The USA and the UK lead the publications in this journal, although at a regional level, Europe is the most productive. The low participation of emerging economies in JKM is also observed.,The paper will identify the leading trends in the journal in terms of papers, authors, institutions, countries, journals and keywords. This study is useful for obtaining a quick snapshot of what is happening in the journal.,From the historical record of JKM publications, this study presents an exclusive bibliometric analysis of its publications until 2016 and identifies its main trends.

Twenty years of the Journal of Knowledge Management: a bibliometric analysis

El analisis de eficiencia en el sector agropecuario se basa a menudo en modelos de soporte para la toma de decisiones porque orientan sobre cuales son los principales factores de produccion y dan lineamientos para resolver los problemas evidenciados. En esta investigacion se caracterizaron los sistemas de produccion porcicolas mediante la metodologia de analisis por agrupamientos, se seleccionaron 50 variables cualitativas y se construyeron 9 indices que miden el grado de tecnificacion de las granjas. Como resultado se obtuvieron 4 agrupamientos: granjas de cria, levante y ceba, ciclo completo y ciclo completo especializado; las granjas de este ultimo grupo son las que realizan las mejores practicas de gestion productiva basados en los indices de importancia obtenidos. Adicionalmente, se realizo la evaluacion de la eficiencia relativa de los sistemas de produccion porcinos del departamento de Cundinamarca mediante la metodologia DEA, con un modelo VRS orientado a las salidas, se utilizaron las DMU´s levante-ceba, y ciclo completo ya que estas tienen el mismo objetivo productivo. La eficiencia relativa de las DMU´s ciclo completo fue de 77,57% y de las DMU´s levante y ceba fue de 75,78%. Asi mismo, se analizo cuales granjas realizaban practicas ambientales para el manejo de excretas, por medio de las variables de salida ambientales “fertilizante producido (kg)” y “valor venta fertilizante ($/kg)”, los resultados demuestran que el 62,16% de las DMU´s de ciclo completo y el 41,79% de las DMU´s de levante y ceba realizan procesos para mitigar el impacto ambiental de los sistemas de produccion porcicolas. Con los resultados obtenidos se destaca la importancia de establecer procesos sostenibles para el manejo adecuado de insumos y la mitigacion de los residuos (productos) en los sistemas de produccion porcinos como una estrategia para mejorar la eficiencia relativa de este sector.

Evaluación de la eficiencia relativa de los sistemas de producción porcícolas del departamento de Cundinamarca, utilizando análisis envolvente de datos (DEA)

The purpose of this research is to determine the efficiency of energy usage and its role in carbon dioxide emissions (CI) and economic-environmental efficiency (EEE) for some countries Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies. For environment quality assessment, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to assess the data cover the period from 2013 to 2017. In this study, primary energy consumption (PEC) and population are two basic inputs along with gross domestic product (GDP) and carbon dioxide emissions that are desirable and undesirable  outputs, respectively. The practical outcomes illustrate that Brunei, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong are the most effective and efficient states for the 5 years periods (2013–2017) in terms of energy efficiency and to reduce emission of carbon dioxide. In addition, other states in the OECD region shows greater economic proficiency than environmental proficiency. Furthermore, the results shows that energy efficiency has strong bonding with carbon emissions; however there is a weaker association between economic-environmental efficiency. Thus, the attainment of optimal level of energy efficiency could be more pivotal than economic efficiency to improve environmental efficiency in countries from the OECD region.

Economics of energy and environmental efficiency: evidence from OECD countries.

Increasing social concerns over the environmental externalities associated with business activities are pushing firms to identify activities that create economic value with less environmental impact and to become more eco-efficient. Over the past two decades, researchers have increasingly used frontier efficiency models to evaluate productive efficiency in the presence of undesirable outputs, such as greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, we identify critical flaws of existing frontier models and show that under these models eco-inefficient firms can be identified as eco-efficient. We develop a new eco-inefficiency frontier model that rectifies these problems. Our model allows us to calculate, for each firm, an eco-inefficiency score and improvements in outputs necessary to attain eco-efficiency. We demonstrate, through a Monte-Carlo experiment that our eco-inefficiency model provides a more reliable measurement of corporate eco-inefficiency than the existing frontier models. In the simulation experiment we develop a production function of multiple desirable and undesirable outputs that extends the classical Cob-Douglas function of a single output. The multi-output production function allows for greater flexibility in the simulation analysis of frontier models.

Measuring Eco-inefficiency: A New Frontier Approach

Data envelopment analysis application in sustainability: The origins, development and future directions

Sustainable development and sustainability assessment have been of great interest to both academe and practitioners in the past decades. In this study, we review the literature on data envelopment analysis (DEA) applications in sustainability using citation-based approaches. A directional network is constructed based on citation relationships among DEA papers published in journals indexed by the Web of Science database from 1996 to 2019. We first draw the citation chronological graph to present a complete picture of literature development trajectory since 1996. Then we identify the local main DEA development paths in sustainability research by assigning an importance index, namely search path count (SPC), to each link in the citation network. The local main path suggests that the current key route of DEA applications in sustainability focus on the environmental sustainability. Through the Kamada–Kawai layout algorithm, we find four research clusters in the literature including corporate sustainability assessment, regional sustainability assessment, sustainability composite indicator construction, and sustainability performance analysis. For each of the clusters, we further identify the key articles based on citation network and local citation scores, demonstrate the developmental trajectory of the literature, and suggest future research directions.

Haibo Zhou

Papers

Data envelopment analysis application in sustainability: The origins, development and future directions

DEA Application in Sustainability 1996–2019: The Origins, Development, and Future Directions