Sustainability Indicators Past and Present: What next?

In 2014 Routledge approached us and asked if we would be interested in editing a book on Sustainability Indicators (SIs). With a combined experience from over 30 thirty years of effort and learning from responses to our... [ view full abstract ]

In 2014 Routledge approached us and asked if we would be interested in editing a book on Sustainability Indicators (SIs). With a combined experience from over 30 thirty years of effort and learning from responses to our previous books and papers, we felt that this may well be an excellent opportunity to reflect on SIs and their ambition of ‘measuring the immeasurable’. What is the current state of thought amongst the SI community? What has been achieved and where were we succeeding and failing? These were questions we had been asking ourselves, especially with the recent rise of ‘alternative facts’, ‘fake news’ and the Twitter phenomenon where complexity is condensed into tweets of just a few hundred characters. How do SIs fit into all of this, especially as they are themselves designed to capture complexity into condensed signals and it has long been known that SIs can be selectively portrayed to support polarised sides of a debate? Editing a book is not an easy task. Esteemed and distinguished authors must be willing to engage in the process and write for a ‘collection’ - a task often seen, unfortunately, as lacking in high academic merit - but we were delighted by the response from our colleagues. Over 50 SI experts from a wide range of backgrounds have collaborated in the Routledge Handbook on Sustainability Indicators and Indices. Rich sections on the history and theory of sustainability measurement, approaches and methods used, agencies involved and critiques of where we are today have been constructed in over 30 chapters. This paper is a reflection on our combined learning from the reflection – a mindful reflection on reflection, and an assessment of the malign and benign forces at work in 2018 within the SI arena. Finally, we seek to identify where SI’s may be going over the coming years.