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

Existing approaches to sustainability assessment are typically characterized as being either “top–down” or “bottom–up.” While top–down approaches are commonly adopted by businesses, bottom–up approaches are more often adopted by civil society organizations and communities. Top–down approaches clearly favor standardization and commensurability between other sustainability assessment efforts, to the potential exclusion of issues that really matter on the ground. Conversely, bottom–up approaches enable sustainability initiatives to speak directly to the concerns and issues of communities, but lack a basis for comparability. While there are clearly contexts in which one approach can be favored over another, it is equally desirable to develop mechanisms that mediate between both. In this paper, we outline a methodology for framing sustainability assessment and developing indicator sets that aim to bridge these two approaches. The methodology incorporates common components of bottom–up assessment: constituency-based engagement processes and opportunity to identify critical issues and indicators. At the same time, it uses the idea of a “knowledge base,” to help with the selection of standardized, top–down indicators. We briefly describe two projects where the aspects of the methodology have been trialed with urban governments and communities, and then present the methodology in full, with an accompanying description of a supporting software system.

Reframing social sustainability reporting: towards an engaged approach

Technological advances have made possible industrial and commercial applications of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and highly integrated manufacturing systems. It has also freed business activity from a focus on place, as both work activities and markets have been able to harness information and communication technologies in order to operate remotely. As a result, researchers have highlighted a phenomenon of ‘smart’ working. Some have pointed to a fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) in which ‘smart’ factories use robotics to achieve high performance. There is now a suggestion of progress towards Industry 5.0, in which technological and social systems work in harmony to deliver personalised mass customization of products and services. This paper examines these developments from the perspective of unique, individual understandings of work roles and sustainability, posing the questions ‘Smart’ from whose point of view? Do smart systems promote sustainable organizations? How should design of smart systems be approached? It suggests that contemporary socio-technical systems approaches to organizational analysis are the best way to support harnessing of smart technologies in organizations.

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Socio-Technical Perspectives on Smart Working: Creating Meaningful and Sustainable Systems

This report sums up a literature survey of meta-analytical methods. The objective of the survey is to cover the state-of-the-art in three areas of meta-analysis where we believe there are still unsolved problems and where the choice of approach may still be contentious. These areas are the treatment of heterogeneity, the problem of publication bias and the assessment and incorporation of the quality of the individual studies.

A literature survey

Sustainability is often conceived of as an attempt to balance competing economic, environmental and social priorities. Over the course of three decades of scholarship, however, the meaning and appropriate application of the ‘social pillar’ continues to inspire confusion. In this paper, we posit that the inherent challenge of understanding social sustainability is its many legitimate meanings plus a lack of interdisciplinary scholarship. We draw from literature in multiple disciplines to illustrate five different ways that the concept of social sustainability has been applied in scholarship and professional practice, and highlighting the importance of applications that acknowledge placed-based, process-oriented perspectives that understand social, economic, and environmental imperatives as integrated concepts. Ironically, this framing forecloses on social sustainability as an entity distinct from environmental and economic sustainability. We believe that organizing the conversation around these five applications can help advocates of sustainability use the concept of social sustainability in clear and powerful ways while avoiding applications that relegate the social dimensions of sustainability to an afterthought.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/9/878/pdf

Five Approaches to Social Sustainability and an Integrated Way Forward

This chapter provides a key point of reference for the conjunction of poststructuralism and (thinking on) music. It highlights the tension between the prevalent currents in musicological thinking in the latter decades of the twentieth century – itself strongly inflected by both structuralist and poststructuralist thinking – and key moments in poststructuralist thought itself where the question of music is broached. In so doing, the chapter proposes that these bodies of work afford a sustained – albeit unresolved – engagement with the question of the universal. More specifically, this chapter shows that despite a theoretical rejection of the possibility of universal claims or truths, poststructuralist thinking on music often suggests that there remains a timeless, placeless, universal essence of music. 

On Themes and Variations

We have developed a software application for a new, emerging approach to sustainability reporting, where a multi-agent system is an integral part of the overall architecture. The agent-oriented approach readily achieves the functionality required for this application, and the Belief Desire Intention (BDI) agent framework assisted in clarifying system behaviour across our heterogeneous, crossdisciplinary research team. It has recently been suggested that current reporting practices are failing to capture the full picture of whether an organisation’s practices are sustainable, e.g. [5, 1, 2]. This is due, in part, to the way economic issues are often considered independently from environmental and social issues, and vice versa. Moreover, sustainability reporting is typically addressed using either locally defined or external, standardised indicator sets. This forces a choice between measuring what is most relevant to the organisation, on the one hand, and what allows for comparability with other organisations, on the other. There is a need to support organisations to use a combination of indicators that capture specific local concerns and indicators which can be used to communicate and compare the organisation’s performance externally.

https://www.ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas2012/papers/X1_3.pdf

Sarah Hickmott

Papers

On Themes and Variations

An Adaptive System for Proactively Supporting Sustainability Goals (Extended Abstract)