Sustainability Assessment: Current Practice and Future Prospects

Dear Colleagues,

While current sustainability challenges seem ever more daunting, ranging from climate change to social inequalities, from the biodiversity crisis to the ever-growing demand for resources, the search for societal and individual solutions to address this multidimensional ‘sustainability crisis’ is also intensifying. The UN-fostered Sustainable Development Goals have boosted sustainability as a concept, and have given it a new, broadly shared momentum (Hacking, 2018). However, as many interpretations of sustainability co-exist—which provide the necessary background for innovative ideas and for the translations of sustainability into actions—this also leads to different expectations (Chanchitpricha and Bond, 2013) and different emphasis on what is needed to achieve sustainable development (Hugé et al., 2013). Sustainability assessment, however broadly defined, holds the promise of adapting and translating sustainability into context-specific, understandable, and measurable bits of understanding that will support decisions in order to achieve a transition towards a more sustainable world (Pope et al., 2017). Sustainability assessment encompasses a range of different approaches with different degrees of formalization (Ness et al., 2007), which is both an advantage in terms of experimenting and innovating with new approaches (e.g., the use of big data or citizen science), and a risk of overstretching the definition and the objectives of the assessment process.

Anyone reflecting on developing and using sustainability assessments may have

experienced difficulties in seeing the wood for the trees at some point; hence, it has become necessary to provide an overview of current practices now that sustainability assessment has come of age (e.g., to update and diversify the insights of Bond et al., 2012 and Morrison-Saunders et al., 2015). Moreover, there is a need to look beyond the near future and to reflect on how sustainability assessment will and can evolve: What role is there for sustainability assessment in times of a seemingly decreasing reliance on evidence when making policy decisions? At the same time, the international momentum in addressing pressing sustainability issues, such as climate change, social inequality, and the deepening biodiversity crisis (Geneletti et al., 2016), highlights the need for practical, user-friendly, and systematic processes to support decision-making. This Special Issue in particular aims to:

• Critically reflect on current sustainability assessment practices, with a focus on the methodological choices that are supposed to measure and integrate plural stakeholders’ values into decision-making;
• Provide empirical input to the sustainability assessment effectiveness debate—what does a ‘good’ sustainability assessment process entail? How can we measure and communicate the impact of a sustainability assessment process? How can we design, use, and communicate sustainability assessment findings to audiences with different expectations?
• Critically reflect on the future of sustainability assessment (in particular regarding the use of digital databases, big data, citizen science, scenarios, etc.), and on how to link the different scales at which sustainability assessment does and can work (from local to regional to global).

References:

A list of ‘reference papers’ that are relevant for the SA topic from other authors/publishers.

1. Bond et al. 2012. Sustainability assessment: the state of the art. Impact Assessment & Project Appraisal 30: 53-62
2. Chanchitpricha & Bond, 2013. Conceptualising the effectiveness of impact assessment processes. Environmental Impact Assessment Review 43: 65-72
3. Gasparatos, A., Scolobig, A., 2012. Choosing the most appropriate sustainability assessment tool. Ecological Economics 80: 1–7
4. Geneletti, D. 2016. Handbook on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Impact Assessment. Edward Elgar Publishing. Cheltenham, UK & Northampton, USA.
5. Gibson, R., 2006a. Beyond the pillars: sustainability assessment as a framework for effective
6. integration of social, economic and ecological considerations in significant decision making. JEAPM 8, 259–280.
7. Hacking, T. 2019. The SDGs and sustainability assessment of private sector projects: theoretical conceptualisation and comparison with current practice using the case study of the Asian Development Bank.  Impact Assessment & Project Appraisal 37: 2-16
8. Hacking, T., Guthrie, P., 2008. A framework for clarifying the meaning of triple bottomline, integrated, and sustainability assessment. Environ. Impact Assess. Rev. 28, 73–89.
9. Hugé et al., 2013. A discourse-analytical perspective on sustainability assessment: sustainable development in practice. Sustainability Science 8: 187-198
10. Morrison-Saunders, A., Pope, J. & Bond,A. 2015. Handbook of sustainability assessment. Edward Elgar Publishing. UK.
11. Ness, B., Urbel-Piirsalua, E., Anderbergd, S. & Olssona, L. 2007. Categorising tools for sustainability assessment. Ecological Economics 60: 498-508
12. Pope. J., Bond, A., Hugé, J; & Morrison-Saunders, A. 2017. Reconceptualising sustainability assessment. Environmental Impact Assessment Review 62: 205-215
13. Zijp, M., Heijungs, R., Van Der Voet, E., Van De Meent, D., Huijbregts, M., Hollander, A., Posthuma, L., 2015. An identification key for selecting methods for sustainability assessments. Sustainability 7, 2490.

Prof. Dr. Jean Hugé
Dr. Jenny Pope
Prof. Angus Morrison-Saunders
Guest Editors

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• Sustainability assessment
• Stakeholder engagement
• Value pluralism
• Decision-making science
• Sustainability indicators
• Impact assessment
• Scenarios
• Sustainable development goals (SDGs)