Normative, systemic and procedural aspects: a review of indicator‐based sustainability assessments in agriculture

Several methods for assessing the sustainability of agricultural systems have been developed. These methods do not fully: (i) take into account the multi‐functionality of agriculture; (ii) include multidimensionality; (iii) utilize and implement the assessment knowledge; and (iv) identify conflicting goals and trade‐offs. This paper reviews seven recently developed multidisciplinary indicator‐based assessment methods with respect to their contribution to these shortcomings. All approaches include (1) normative aspects such as goal setting, (2) systemic aspects such as a specification of scale of analysis, (3) a reproducible structure of the approach. The approaches can be categorized into three typologies. The top‐down farm assessments focus on field or farm assessment. They have a clear procedure for measuring the indicators and assessing the sustainability of the system, which allows for benchmarking across farms. The degree of participation is low, potentially affecting the implementation of the results negatively. The top‐down regional assessment assesses the on‐farm and the regional effects. They include some participation to increase acceptance of the results. However, they miss the analysis of potential trade‐offs. The bottom‐up, integrated participatory or transdisciplinary approaches focus on a regional scale. Stakeholders are included throughout the whole process assuring the acceptance of the results and increasing the probability of implementation of developed measures. As they include the interaction between the indicators in their system representation, they allow for performing a trade‐off analysis. The bottom‐up, integrated participatory or transdisciplinary approaches seem to better overcome the four shortcomings mentioned above

Analysis of the potentials of multi criteria decision analysis methods to conduct sustainability assessment

Sustainability assessments require the management of a wide variety of information types, parameters and uncertainties. Multi criteria decision analysis (MCDA) has been regarded as a suitable set of methods to perform sustainability evaluations as a result of its flexibility and the possibility of facilitating the dialogue between stakeholders, analysts and scientists. However, it has been reported that researchers do not usually properly define the reasons for choosing a certain MCDA method instead of another. Familiarity and affinity with a certain approach seem to be the drivers for the choice of a certain procedure. This review paper presents the performance of five MCDA methods (i.e. MAUT, AHP, PROMETHEE, ELECTRE and DRSA) in respect to ten crucial criteria that sustainability assessments tools should satisfy, among which are a life cycle perspective, thresholds and uncertainty management, software support and ease of use. The review shows that MAUT and AHP are fairly simple to understand and have good software support, but they are cognitively demanding for the decision makers, and can only embrace a weak sustainability perspective as trade-offs are the norm. Mixed information and uncertainty can be managed by all the methods, while robust results can only be obtained with MAUT. ELECTRE, PROMETHEE and DRSA are non-compensatory approaches which consent to use a strong sustainability concept, accept a variety of thresholds, but suffer from rank reversal. DRSA is less demanding in terms of preference elicitation, is very easy to understand and provides a straightforward set of decision rules expressed in the form of elementary “if … then …” conditions. Dedicated software is available for all the approaches with a medium to wide range of results capability representation. DRSA emerges as the easiest method, followed by AHP, PROMETHEE and MAUT, while ELECTRE is regarded as fairly difficult. Overall, the analysis has shown that most of the requirements are satisfied by the MCDA methods (although to different extents) with the exclusion of management of mixed data types and adoption of life cycle perspective which are covered by all the considered approaches

Participation and Watershed Management: Experiences from Brazil

Public participation is emphasized in many new institutional approaches to resource management, especially watershed governance. The implementation of participatory management frameworks, and capacity-building for civil society participants, deserve close attention. This paper reports on an ongoing project in Sao Paulo State, Brazil, which is designed to strengthen the ability of local and NGO representatives to participate in democratic water management structures.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

The Cooperative Participatory Evaluation of Renewable Technologies on Ecosystem Services (CORPORATES)

Publisher PD

District plan implementation under the RMA: Confessions of a resource consent

This report focuses on results from Phase 2 of PUCM - the quality of plan implementation in six district councils selected for their range of plan quality and capacity to plan. Only those results considered to be important for assisting the six councils (and others) to improve implementation of their plans are included in this report. The findings and recommendations, both specific and general, ought to be instructive for other councils, thereby helping to improve their plans and implementation processes. Since hapu/iwi interests formed a key component of the research, the outcomes will help enhance their case for better consideration of their interests when dealing with local government. As well, many of the findings and recommendations relate to matters of governance and capacity building that require Government action, which until done will make it difficult for councils to achieve quality plans and implementation processes

The UN local communities and Indigenous peoples' platform: A traditional ecological knowledge-based evaluation

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2019 The Authors. WIREs Climate Change published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.This review evaluates the potential of the proposed local communities and Indigenous peoples’ platform to effectively engage traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) for climate policy. Specifically, we assess the platform's potential to enable greater representation and participation of Indigenous peoples (IPs) within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). An analytical framework based on the extensive TEK and environmental management literature is developed, with a set of criteria identified against which to evaluate the platform. We find that although the process of designing the platform appears to be inclusive of Indigenous views, the structure itself does not recognize the roles that unequal power relations and colonialism play in marginalizing IPs. Limited attention is paid to the institutional barriers within the UNFCCC and the drawbacks of pursuing knowledge “integration” as an end in itself. Based on this, recommendations for improving the platform structure are put forward including using a rights based framing, giving greater decision-making power to IPs, and developing mechanisms to ensure the holistic integrity of TEK and build the overall resilience of climate mitigation and adaptation systems.Ye

THE USEFULNESS OF ANALYTICAL TOOLS FOR SUSTAINABLE FUTURES

The aim of this study is to assess the usefulness of analytical tools for policy evaluation. The study focuses on a multi-method integrated toolkit, the so-called SMILE toolkit. This toolkit consist of the integration of three evaluation frameworks developed within an EU-funded consortium called Development and Comparison of Sustainability (DECOIN) and further applied within the consortium Synergies in Multi-Scale Inter-Linkages of Eco-social systems (SMILE). This toolkit is developed to provide reporting features that are required for monitoring policy-making. The sustainable development perspective is rather difficult to attempt due to its dynamism and its multi-dimensionality. Therefore, in this study, we aim to assess the usefulness of the SMILE toolkit to sustainable development issues on the basis of the critical factors of sustainable development. In other words, here, we will prove the usefulness of the toolkit to help policymakers to think about and work on sustainable developments in the future.