Routledge Handbook of Sustainability Indicators

Simon Bell, Stephen Morse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317200314
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

This handbook provides researchers and students with an overview of the field of sustainability indicators (SIs) as applied in the interdisciplinary field of sustainable development. The editors have sought to include views from the center ground of SI development but also divergent ideas which represent some of the diverse, challenging and even edgy observations which are prominent in the wider field of SI thinking.

The contributions in this handbook:

• clearly set out the theoretical background and history of SIs, their origins, roots and initial goals

• expand on the disciplines and modalities employed to develop SIs of various kinds

• assess the various ways in which SI data are gathered and the availability (over space and time) and quality issues that surround them

• explore the multiplex world of SIs as expressed in agencies around the world, via examples of SI practice and the lessons that have emerged from them

• critically review the progress that SIs have made over the last 30 years

• express the divergence of views which are held about the value of SIs, including differing theories on their efficacy, efficiency and ethics

• explore the frontier of contemporary SI thinking, reviewing ante/post and systemic alternatives

This multidisciplinary and international handbook will be of great interest to researchers, students and practitioners working in sustainability research and practice.

1
Introduction

Indicators and post truth

Simon Bell and Stephen Morse

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.

– Elizabeth Cady Stanton

It would seem that this book is timely in a major and more important way than we thought at the outset when we began planning in 2015. When we began work, the major requirement for it had yet to emerge. Certainly, a book which brought together some of the most eminent and thoughtful authorities in the indicator universe had great merit. Definitely, a collection of essays on the topography of indicators and sustainable development is timely. Absolutely, to compare and contrast the thoughts of the authors of this landscape is priceless as we have never been so much in need of indicators to assess, in an impartial and confirmable manner, the outlines of our changing, developing, resilient and threatened world. But the main reason for this book was to emerge in the unravelling of the 20th century shared and liberal mindset which has been with us since the end of World War 2. This unravelling has been taking place since the second half of 2016. One would have to have a Panglossian mind to imagine that we are not now in a different place to the place we contemplated in 2015. We now know that a new and dangerous reality has emerged which not only threatens the stability of the complex world of indicators – from conception to verification – but the rational mindset which conceived of them as a good thing in the first place.

To the surprise of many and the bemusement of the majority of intellectuals, academics and just rational people, the world appears to be spinning towards what has been labelled a “post-truth” reality. What is post truth? The Oxford dictionary named it as the word of the year and has defined it as:

Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

This is not a world with which we are unfamiliar. Those working in the indicator business (if we may so denote the field) are well aware of the ‘emotion and personal belief’ which helps to shape the selection, data gathering and assessment of many indicators. Indeed, in this book we have robust chapters which deal with this important aspect of indicator work. What has come as more of a surprise has been the destructive and senseless denial of the importance and value of objective expertise.

The first and most obvious precursor of the post-truth Weltanschauung in the UK appeared during the recent, divisive European Union referendum. In the comments by the then Justice Secretary, and at the time of writing the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Michael Gove, objective data was called into question. The Financial Times reported the incident as follows:

Michael Gove has refused to name any economists who back Britain’s exit from the European Union, saying that “people in this country have had enough of experts”… . He said that Vote Leave, the official Out campaign, would publish more details on its economic plans next week. So far it has said the UK could cut VAT on fuel and spend “additional millions” on the NHS… . Sky’s political editor Faisal Islam said Mr Gove knew that figure was wrong, and accused him of importing the “post-truth” politics of Donald Trump to the UK. The UK Statistics Authority has said the figure “is misleading and undermines trust in official statistics”, because it is a gross sum and does not account for Britain’s rebate and funding received from the EU.

(Mance 2016)

The source of post truth can be tracked back to the Trump campaign in the US presidential election, and the basis for the denial of facts and rational interpretation of collected data can be seen to have a ground zero in that troubled politics. In his brilliant article in the Guardian in January 2017, William Davies argued that we who look for accountability and empirical verification in our decision-making could be in trouble.

Shortly before the November presidential election, a study in the US discovered that 68% of Trump supporters distrusted the economic data published by the federal government. In the UK, a research project by Cambridge University and YouGov looking at conspiracy theories discovered that 55% of the population believes that the government “is hiding the truth about the number of immigrants living here”.

(Davies 2017)

As Davies goes on to say:

The declining authority of statistics – and the experts who analyse them – is at the heart of the crisis that has become known as “post-truth” politics. And in this uncertain new world, attitudes towards quantitative expertise have become increasingly divided. From one perspective, grounding politics in statistics is elitist, undemocratic and oblivious to people’s emotional investments in their community and nation. It is just one more way that privileged people in London, Washington DC or Brussels seek to impose their worldview on everybody else. From the opposite perspective, statistics are quite the opposite of elitist. They enable journalists, citizens and politicians to discuss society as a whole, not on the basis of anecdote, sentiment or prejudice, but in ways that can be validated. The alternative to quantitative expertise is less likely to be democracy than an unleashing of tabloid editors and demagogues to provide their own “truth” of what is going on across society.

(Davies 2017)

Let us lay one error to rest before it has a chance to emerge.

Those working in the area of indicator development have no issue with the importance of personal perspective and subjectivity in the area of indicators. We fully appreciate the value of the local and the personal in all stages of indicator formulation, selection, prioritization, assessment and outreach. Indeed, as long ago as 1999 the authors noted:

Sustainability indicators were spawned from an understandable desire to ‘do’ sustainable development and not just talk about it, but no matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise they are still based upon what we each experience as a complex mix of cultural, social, ethical and professional aspirations and understandings. The dominant or emergent vision of sustainability, and the SIs that equate to it, will inevitably arise out of a negotiation between the visions of many individuals and groups. The emergent vision may well be that of scientists, planners, politicians, academics, environmentalists, interest groups, the public or a dynamic and changing coalition of all or some of these. They will invariably have views and ideas that are contested by other groups and which are not seen as being straightforward or absolute, ‘true’ or unchangeable. Sustainability indicators are, like all good statistics, measures of tendency interpreted to an agenda set by imperfect people.

(Bell and Morse 1999 page XI)

The indicator community did not suggest that indicators should be expert impositions. Rather they are emergent from process. Many of the chapters in this book bear eloquent evidence of the time and trouble researchers have gone to make sure that they are inclusive and reflective of a range of emotional and empathetic issues and not merely the quantitative facts of empirical measurement. Within the pages of this book there is copious evidence.

What seems to be emerging in the early years of the 21st century appears to be a cynical and corrupting attempt to conflate prejudice with empathy, bias with inclusion and bullying with expertise. Of course, experts using numbers have a long tradition, Davies notes:

The emergence in the late 17th century of government advisers claiming scientific authority, rather than political or military acumen, represents the origins of the “expert” culture now so reviled by populists. These path-breaking individuals were neither pure scholars nor government officials, but hovered somewhere between the two. They were enthusiastic amateurs who offered a new way of thinking about populations that privileged aggregates and objective facts. Thanks to their mathematical prowess, they believed they could calculate what would otherwise require a vast census to discover.

(Davies 2017)

And Davies goes on to recognize that indicators are sharing issues which all figures, data collection and data interpretation now have:

The crisis of statistics is not quite as sudden as it might seem. For roughly 450 years, the great achievement of statisticians has been to reduce the complexity and fluidity of national populations into manageable, comprehensible facts and figures. Yet in recent decades, the world has changed dramatically, thanks to the cultural politics that emerged in the 1960s and the reshaping of the global economy that began soon after. It is not clear that the statisticians have always kept pace with these changes. Traditional forms of statistical classification and definition are coming under strain from more fluid identities, attitudes and economic pathways. Efforts to represent demographic, social and economic changes in terms of simple, well-recognised indicators are losing legitimacy.

(Davies 2017)

Davies is right but the indicator community has long been aware of the issue of legitimacy. What we have not been prepared for has been the brazen yet ignorant attack on the whole process of objective/subjective enlightenment rationalism. Davies chillingly concludes:

A post-statistical society is a potentially frightening proposition, not because it would lack any forms of truth or expertise altogether, but because it would drastically privatise them. Statistics are one of many pillars of liberalism, indeed of Enlightenment. The experts who produce and use them have become painted as arrogant and oblivious to the emotional and local dimensions of politics. No doubt there are ways in which data collection could be adapted to reflect lived experiences better. But the battle that will need to be waged in the long term is not between an elite-led politics of facts versus a populist politics of feeling. It is between those still committed to public knowledge and public argument and those who profit from the ongoing disintegration of those things.

(Davies 2017)

It would seem that the post-truth phenomenon plays upon a natural tendency in human beings to go for an easy option in their decision-making. In his landmark book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, Daniel Kahneman fictionalizes the human mind to a System 1 and System 2 which he also calls the automatic and the effortful. He suggests:

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

(Kahneman 2011 page 32)

System 1 is knee jerk and thoughtless to some extent. It takes time, effort and rationalism to engage with System 2. The post-truth world is a System 1 world where people of all political persuasions and none are buffeted from one idea to the next with scant or dubious information to support them, making decisions which may ultimately impact upon us all.

It is into this world that this book emerges.

In 2015 our aspiration for this book now appears startlingly naïve. In our pitch for the publication with Routledge we suggested that:

Sustainable Development (SD) is a vast creator and consumer of indicators and indices (where an index comprises a number of indicators) of all kinds. The range of creators and potential users extends from government to non-governmental organizations, through professional practitioners in SD and Environmental Management (EM) to academics and researchers working in international research organizations and higher education institutions worldwide and of course the multitude of students who are studying in these various agencies.

Indeed, we did understand that indicators related to sustainable development were multiply produced and consumed. We recognized the conflicts surrounding sustainability indicators and indices (we used the abbreviation SII for them in the pitch).

The numerous books and articles written on SIIs witness the popularity and topicality of the field and yet very few resources exist which tell the full story of the SII phenomena nor is the conflictual and contested story of SII development, assessment and use widely understood.

Please note, we understood the conflictual basis. What we were not to understand at that time was that a ‘conflictual and contested story’ might morph into a fundamental assault on the nature of data, fact and truth.

Our original objective was:

to provide researchers and more general readers worldwide with an oversight of the field of SIIs as applied in the wide variety of fields embraced by SD. The handbook is intended to be provocative as well as being informative. In editing this book we have sought to include views from the centre ground of SII development but also divergent views which represent some of the diverse, challenging and even edgy observations which are prominent in the wider field of environmental indicator thinking.

And this remains true to this day but we need to now emphasize the ‘edgy observations’ and add that the book has a new and important mission.

We do support the need for empirical and verifiable and contestable indicators. We also urgently and defiantly register that this book provides a robust defence of the need for and the necessity to maintain the effort to produce resilient and honest measures and indicators.

So, what is this book about?

Sustainability indicators, environmental indicators and the indices which exist alongside them have been with us now for over 40 years. This duration has seen thinking change and adapt as the mission of the exercise moved and changed. If the intention was to provide a means to assess the durability of the earth system, then the path to make this assessment has been varied and precocious. For 40 years minds of all calibre have engaged in the means to measure the immeasurable – the concept of the sustainable world. If our work here is to bear witness to this huge, global and multidisciplinary work then it has to span many minds and many mindsets. This book is a map of the terrain so far traversed.

First, the book structure. The book is organized as a series of sections which build upon each other. There are four sections to the book:

• Part I deals with the history and theory of indicators and indices in the field of sustainable development.
• Part II looks at the main methods and approaches which have been used to gather and assess these indicators.
• Part III contains a series of agency reports on the use of indicators.
• Part IV provides some critiques of where we are, thoughts about where else we might be and how we might get there.

We do have to stress here that although we – as editors – were keen to have a structure and also to make sure that key places within the SI landscape were covered, we otherwise took a very ‘hands-off’ approach to the contributions of the authors. We did not wish to ‘direct’ authors in any particular way other than address any issues of clarity (of which, it has to be said, there were very few) and a desire to make sure that the authors were aware of what the others were doing and hence introduce a degree of cross-referencing where appropriate. After all, all the contributors to the book are experts in their field and while at times they may disagree with each other or perhaps arrive at the same point from quite different directions, we saw no reason to involve ourselves any further. The result, we hope the reader will agree, is a diverse, wide-ranging and thought-provoking series of essays on sustainability indicators and indices. Here follows a brief overview of the book chapters based on the abstracts provided by the authors.

Chapter 1 in which Simon and Steve set the scene for the book.

Part I: Theory and history

Chapter 2 Bellagio STAMP: principles for sustainability assessment and measurement by László Pintér, Peter Hardi, André Martinuzzi, Jon Hall

Revisiting the way society defines and measures progress has been identified as one of the key levers in tackling the root causes of unsustainable development. The recent economic and food crises exposed a critical weakness in the ability of currently mainstream indicators of progress to provide early warning and take adequate preventive action.

Since the early 1990s a growing number of organizations have been involved in the development of indicator systems around the key socio-economic and environmental concerns of sustainable development within their own context. In order to provide guidance and promote best practice, in 1997 a global group of leading measurement and assessment experts developed the Bellagio Principles. The Bellagio Principles have become a widely quoted reference point for measuring sustainable development, but new developments in policy, science, civil society and technology have made their...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms
• 1 Introduction: indicators and post truth
• Part I Theory and history
• Part II Methods
• Part III Agency experience
• Part IV Critique of sustainability indicators and indices
• In conclusion
• Index