Measuring and assessing contributions to sustainable development

Measurement and assessment of sustainable development must be executed to reduce the risk of failure in the transition to sustainability. The old axiom “what gets measured gets managed” (e.g. Parris & Kates, 2003) or its reverse “what is not measured often gets ignored” (e.g. Giljum, Burger, Hinterberger, Lutter & Bruckner, 2011) prevails. Measurement and assessment address both the descriptive-analytical and the transformational mode of sustainable development (see Section 2.1; Wiek et al., 2012): They generate and structure information to serve decision making (Waas et al., 2014).

Introduction

The Atlantic hurricane season terminated for this term with category-5 hurricanes such as Dorian (National Weather Service, 2019). Because of climate change, intense and damaging hurricanes are three times more frequent nowadays than 100 years ago (Grinsted, Ditlevsen & Hesselbjerg, 2019; McGrath, 2019). Likewise, scientific evidence suggests that climate change made Europe's major heatwave in 2018 more than twice as likely to occur (Schiermeier, 2018; World Weather Attribution, 2018).

Methodology

Because sustainable development only becomes defined when measured (see Chapter 3; e.g. Bell & Morse, 2008), sustainable development index construction is an unsupervised modelling task without a supervising output variable (G. James, Witten, Hastie & Tibshirani, 2013). Consequently, sustainable development measurement is diverse in methods and methodologies (see Section 3.2, Section 3.3, and Section 4.2) and hallmarked by subjectivity and arbitrariness (e.g. Böhringer & Jochem, 2007), such that sustainable development indicators are rather confusing and non-consensual (Pope et al., 2017; Ramos & Moreno Pires, 2013). To counteract this finding and to achieve objectivity in assessment (see Table 10.1007/978-3-658-33246-4_3; Sala et al., 2015), the previous theoretical research is coupled with a profound methodological research.

Conceptual framework of sustainable development

In this chapter, a conceptual framework of sustainable development is elaborated by an extensive literature research. Along with this, the first four research gaps are uncovered. Jabareen (2009) defines a “conceptual framework as a network [...] of interlinked concepts that together provide a comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon or phenomena”.

Empirical findings

In this chapter, the previously developed methodology of the MLSDI (see Chapter 4) is computed for a sample region, and the empirical findings are presented and discussed. Thereby, the knowledge (see Section 2.3.3; e.g. Weitz et al., 2018) and the sustainability gap (see Section 2.3.4; e.g. Hall et al., 2017) are tackled.

Discussion and conclusion

This chapter discusses and reflects on the accomplished theoretical (see Chapter 2 and Chapter 3), methodological (see Chapter 4), and the empirical research (see Chapter 5). The present work is part of Phase C of the transdisciplinary research agenda in sustainability science (see Section 2.3.4; e.g. Lang et al., 2012). It draws on previous studies and problem framings from research and practice (Phase A), makes use of prior disclosures from the scientific and the practitioner community (Phase B), and finally provides new results that are relevant for both research and practice (Phase C).