Multi-Indicator Harvest Strategies for Data-Limited Fisheries: A Practitioner Guide to Learning and Design

As the world population grows, fisheries practitioners will be under increased pressure to address global challenges in data-limited fisheries management. With a focus on addressing localized and case-specific management needs, we provide a practical guide to the design and development of multi-indicator frameworks for fishery management. In a data-limited context, indicators are observations or estimates of the state of the fishery resource that are typically proxies for variables of interest, rather than quantities such as stock biomass estimated from data-rich stock assessments. Indicator frameworks structure the integration and interpretation of indicators to guide tactical fishery decision-making, often when the application of more formal analytical assessments is not feasible, yet where indicators in combination provide insight into stock status. With a focus on multi-indicator frameworks, we describe a pragmatic approach for their development via a set of organizational steps, considering a wide spectrum of types and severity of information limitations. We highlight where multi-indicator frameworks can be insightful and informative in relation to single indicator approaches but also point to potential pitfalls, with emphasis on critical evaluation and detection of performance flaws during the design phase using methods such as management strategy evaluation.

Sustainable Urban Development: A Review of Urban Sustainability Indicator Frameworks

The issue of urban sustainability is currently exceptionally up to date, and the sustainable development of cities has become an important topic on the political level. Many cities in the world are facing acute challenges concerning growing dangers to the environment and ensuring quality of life for their inhabitants. In connection with cities achieving their individual goals of sustainable development, urban sustainability indicator frameworks (USIFs) are becoming the subjects of attention. Such frameworks enable sustainability to be clearly measured and assessed. In this article, we analysed selected global and European USIFs in terms of their commonalities and differences, sustainability dimensions, thematic categories, and categorised indicators. Based on the analysis of the content of the reviewed frameworks, we compiled a list of generally recognised thematic categories within the four main dimensions of sustainable development, and we identified the key indicators of urban sustainability. Our review showed differences in the existing approaches that substantially contributed to the current inconsistencies in assessing and measuring sustainable development in cities. Our results provide an overview of this issue, e.g., to decision makers, and could concurrently serve as a generally applicable foundation for the creation of new urban sustainability indicator frameworks. We also point out the current trends and challenges in the domain of urban sustainability assessment.

A FRAMEWORK TO ANALYSE THE QUALITY OF ECEC SERVICES ACCORDING TO THE CHILD-CENTRED CULTURE

In this contribution it is proposed a critical framework, based on Basil Bernstein’s theory, for two aims. The first one is a critical reflection on some structural limits of the Indicator Frameworks used to evaluate the quality of Early Childhood Education and Care services (ECEC), since they rely mainly on measures of the structural and processual characteristics of the educational settings. As a consequence, the processual dimensions are reduced to their individual components, overlooking the complex and contingent interactions that create opportunities for learning. The second aim is to propose a framework, based on Basil Bernstein’s theory to analyse the different child-centred approaches to ECEC.

Gathering Global Intelligence for Assessing Performance of Smart, Sustainable, Resilient, and Inclusive Cities (S2RIC)

This chapter sets up a comprehensive, multidimensional indicator framework for assessing performance of Smart, Sustainable, Resilient, and Inclusive Cities (S2RIC). A thorough review of contemporary, globally-initiated, indicator frameworks that address cities' smartness, sustainability, resilience, and inclusiveness is conducted – top-down approach; coupled with an attempt to integrate the different perspectives explored into a more enriched and coherent indicator framework. This aims at providing assistance to urban planners and policy makers in assessing, monitoring, managing cities, and making more informed sustainability decisions; while keeping in track with new concerns in the urban planning realm (e.g. resilience, disaster reduction) and recently endorsed global sustainability goals and frameworks. An indicators' selection process is also illustrated – bottom-up approach – for navigating in the proposed framework and identifying appropriate city- and citizen-specific indicators for carrying out relevant assessments and guiding sound policies.

Governance Indicators

As difficult as it might seem to define governance, it appears to be that much more difficult to measure it. Since the World Bank Institute launched the Worldwide Governance Indicators in the late 1990s, the governance indicators field has flourished and experienced significant advances in terms of methodology, data coverage and quality, and policy relevance. Other major initiatives have added to a momentum that propelled research on governance indicators seen in few other academic fields in the economic and social sciences. Given these developments and the prominence and policy relevance the field of governance indicator research has achieved, the time is ripe to take stock and ask what has been accomplished, what the shortcomings and potentials might be, and what steps present themselves as a way forward. This volume—the fifth edition in an annual series tackling different aspects of governance around the world—assesses what has been achieved, identifies strengths and weaknesses of current work, and points to issues that need to be tackled in order to advance the field, both in its academic importance as well as in its policy relevance. In short, the contributions to this volume explore the scope of existing governance indices and indicator frameworks, elaborate on current challenges in measuring and analysing governance, and consider how to overcome them.

Building a Metaframework for Sustainable Transport Indicators

Several recent papers presented at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere have reported on efforts to make sustainability manageable. To this end, the papers suggested the use of indicators and performance measures to help conceptualize and operationalize sustainability for transportation-related planning and decision making. Often these studies presented frameworks that would allow sustainability indicators and measures to be included in, for example, agency strategies and practices. Moreover, some papers suggested criteria for the selection of individual indicators and performance measures. The studies, however, did not always agree on the definition of a framework or how to use one to make sustainability-based decisions, and they tended to differ on underscored aspects and concerns. The current study addressed the issue of frameworks more generically and explored what was termed a “metaframework” with a set of associated criteria to guide the framing of indicators for sustainable transportation. On the basis of an explicit framework theory, the three functions of conceptualization, operationalization, and utilization were found to provide a logical structure of complementary features with which to build indicator frameworks. Characteristics of robust indicator frameworks were evaluated in terms of their significance for the three key functions, and they were collected in a list of criteria. A review of the Brundtland Report provided an example of how a more finely grained understanding of sustainability can inform the conceptualization criterion ranking of sustainability impacts. The metaframework was intended primarily as a basis for empirical analysis and for meta-evaluation of existing practice frameworks with respect to the strength of the level of sustainability that they are likely to provide.

Accounting for Multiculturalism: The Utility of Cultural Indicators and the Politics of Diversity and Participation

Multiculturalism has become a charged arena in recent times with proponents and critics focusing on the value of its utility. Existing models measuring the outcome of multiculturalism emanate from the social sciences that attempt to assess the degree of inter-cultural integration through cultural indices on ethnicity and tradition. This article argues that arts impact studies in general, and emergent cultural indicator frameworks in particular, provide a more robust arena for considering the utility of multiculturalism to claims of social, cultural and economic wellbeing. This article examines the impact of multicultural arts through the quality of cultural participation. It begins by critically surveying global, national and local indicator frameworks on measuring multiculturalism in recent developments of cultural policy. It suggests that current frameworks for thinking about cultural diversity and cultural participation are inadequate, and there is a need to develop a more nuanced understanding of these relations as they are played out in the context of people’s everyday cultural lives. It proposes a new framework that highlights a bi-directional theory-based approach to cultural citizenship and tests its utility against original fieldwork conducted in the growth corridor outer suburb of Whittlesea in Melbourne, Australia.