‘Compared to what?’ — r3.0 issues a strong call to transform from incrementalist to thresholds-based sustainability measurement in a new UNRISD paper
Written by r3.0 Senior Director Bill Baue
The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) just released a report by our Senior Director Bill Baue: Compared to What? A Three-Tiered Typology of Sustainable Development Performance Indicators: From Incremental to Contextual to Transformational.
“Compared to what?”… that’s the key question this report asks, when it comes to assessing sustainable development performance (riffing on the jazz song by that name, as famously performed by Les McCann & Eddie Harris at the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival, which you can listen to while reading this article.)
So-called sustainable development indicators abound, but do they actually do what they purport to do? Not really, argues Bill in this report: almost no current sustainable development indicators, that is, actually indicate sustainable development.
Why not? To answer this question, it helps to ask, compared to what? Current sustainability indicators typically compare performance to incremental goalposts — less this, less that — which, of course, doesn’t actually tell us anything about the sustainability of the impacts.
To remedy this, the report invokes the Sustainability Quotient (S = A/N), which compares actual impacts (in the numerator) to normative impacts (in the denominator) to calibrate sustainability.
The report then proposes a 3-Tier Typology of Sustainable Development Performance Indicators:
This is the beginning of a major restructuring of the logic of sustainability success measurement. It started with recommendations in r3.0’s earlier Blueprints on Reporting and Data, but the collaboration with UNRISD now allows us to go deeper and come to new structures, following what the late Donella Meadows and ex-World Bank Chief Economist Herman Daly started to sketch more than 20 years ago.
r3.0 has been asked by UNRISD to carry forward and Bill is already working on a follow-up report that translates the 33 Tier One Incrementalist Indicators from this United Nations Conference on Trade & Development (UNCTAD) report into Tier Two Contextualized (i.e. Thresholds-Based) Indicators.
Just after publication ,the recognition that this seminal piece of work is a must-read already flows in from many sides, here are a few
