The use of sustainability indicators to measure the ‘quality of life’ - Accounting for multiple perspectives

There is growing interest in sustainability indicators by a wide range of thinkers and practitioners. That much was evident from the introductions of participants at a one-day course convened by the Society for Sustainability Engineering and Science.

A need for better understanding about the application and reporting of indicators was stressed by council workers, the quality of indicators in environmental reporting was important to Ministry of Environment staff, researchers expressed interest in effective processes for developing indicators, and practising engineers and architects from the private sector talked of their role in improving sustainable practices and their encounters with divergent standards and languages of government partners. In response to such expectations the facilitators of the workshop – David Kettle and Dave Breuer of Anew NZ – presented an introduction to the complexities of using indicators for planning and administration of government policy. The workshop had been prepared to provide working knowledge of this subject and to stimulate debate. Sure enough, the discussion this generated showed some of the wider issues that the development of indicators must struggle with.

Policy development at the overlap of social, economic, environmental and cultural interests is subject to an array of influences. How problems are identified and understood is determined by which role one plays in this space. That the world of public administration and policy processes continues to undergo important changes which put established knowledge and practices in question has been described in diverse academic and popular writing . Approaching policy analysis only analytically will no longer produce unproblematic understanding. In practice, well-designed objectives and plans are contested politically, agreed through compromise and disappoint in implementation. This means that to produce, and then agree on, meaningful indicators cannot expect to apply textbook formulas but unavoidably requires a deliberative process that can never arrive at a final formulation, but can only aim at progressing in stages. To demonstrate this claim, one need only consider the requirements that the different perspectives present.

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