Evaluation of sustainable development

Research project P 14205 Evaluation of sustainable development Uwe SCHUBERT 08.05.2000 Sustainable development has been a guiding paradigm for policy formulation in the 1990s. Successively, one finds more and more attempts to transfer this paradigm into the political arena. Dynamic developments are experienced by sustainability projects on the communal level (for example, the idea of the local agenda 21). Local economic relations (communal administration - enterprises) are the center of these projects. These projects cannot build on a political or organizational tradition and are therefore still at the pilot stage. An accompanying evaluation of all phases of the project (from the idea to implementation) offers the possibility of organized learning project by project. In this way, a respective demand for the evaluation of sustainable development emerges. Traditional evaluation research has had to face methodological problems, which have not been satisfactorily answered so far. Sustainable development is a very complex political term. Neither a generally agreed-upon scientific definition nor a practical operationalisation of the term are available. There are certain common parameters that are used in the discussion as necessary conditions. These include the following: long time horizon, integration of all relevant groups for the societal decision-making process, an interdisciplinary foundation for the research field, the possible goal conflicts of the triade, etc. These complex elements associated with sustainability complicate and/or obstruct practical empirical work pertaining to this topic; as the political importance of sustainabililty continues to increase, evaluation research must develop a serious scientific approach that can account for this complexity.

The development of a uniform and primarily method-based instrument for the evaluation of sustainable development is considered not to be useful by the inquired experts. However, there is reckoned to be a need for a methodologically well-founded and theoretically elaborated evaluation-model, which helps to specify and operationalize the design parameters of the decision-path (including issues like clients and stakeholders interests, the information needs, the temporal orientation, the spatial, temporal and contextual delimitation, the framework conditions and resources, the contextual referential system, the quality management as well as the use of the results) of an evaluation of sustainable development. The development of an application oriented Tool Box offers one possibility to meet this need. The research project - funded by the "Austrian Science Fund" - "Sustainable development and the evaluation process at the regional / local level (S.D.-EVA-Pro)" was aiming at three main issues: - to analyze the evaluation of sustainable development concerning its main features, its theoretical background as well as its practical challenges - to develop a referential system of sustainable development - to propose a partly standardized evaluation model of sustainable development - a so called Tool Box A large variety of research methods were chosen for the research project, to obtain the desired output. A broad as well as deep document research and analyses was aiming to define the theoretical framework as well as serving as the basis for the following empirical research of the topic. The analyses of fifty evaluation reports and four case studies was offering an in detail look into the practical side of the evaluation of sustainable development. The results were supplemented by the outcome of questionnaire-guided expert-interviews. To complete the research approach, a market analyses within the German speaking countries was conducted to identify the need for a Tool Box for the evaluation of sustainable development as judged by (potential) clients. The research project succeeded in developing a broad while operational referential system of sustainable development. The suggested approach does not only contain aspects of the sustainable resource- or potential-use but it combines these aspects with system- as well as process-aspects, something that thus far has been attempted only in very few cases. The referential system can (and was used by the research project) be used for empirical research to deal with the (often heterogeneous) understanding for sustainable development, the communication about sustainable development and communication- as well as understanding-problems related to this issue. Furthermore, the aspects of the referential system have different qualitative levels (e.g. strong, intermediate and weak sustainability), which are enabling an adaptation to a specific setting as well as an oriented development of processes for sustainable development (e.g. from an intermediate to a strong approach). Such a differentiation of different qualitative levels is also allowing a clear differentiation from non-sustainable approaches. The referential system is a key feature of the Tool Box for the evaluation of sustainable development. The Tool Box is offering a more differentiated approach than a mere description of method-sets for the evaluation of sustainable development. It is consisting of a partly standardized evaluation model for the evaluation of sustainable development, which is linking the contextual focus of the evaluation flexibly with the variable intervention-depth of the evaluator. Concrete methods can then be derived from such a specific linkage, without being confined to inflexible method sets. The Tool Box is depicting the above mentioned decision path for the client and is offering orientation concerning the contextual focus of the evaluation, the role of the evaluator and is offering support for the client as well as for the evaluator for the commission of an evaluation of sustainable development. The Tool Box, which was developed during the research project, can also be used (with certain adaptations that were not issue of the project) for other evaluation types.