Research looks into new indicators for measuring community well-being and supporting change

Submitted by Simon Harvey on July 12, 2011 - 5:37am.

Ian Challenger provides a quick update on his work at Cawthron Institute in New Zealand to develop new indicator sets that can measure sustainable behaviour in the community, and support the role of soft urban infrastructure in advancing the transformation towards a sustainable society of the future.

Achieving sustainability requires change at all levels: government, business and community. With so many current sustainability challenges being determined by people’s personal behaviour, and the way our community settlements work on a day to day basis, solving the community piece of the puzzle is fundamental. In 2009 TNSNZ advisor Ian Challenger, from the Cawthron Institute, became involved in a research programme working with communities to understand what makes them change and how to measures their progress towards sustainability.

There is general agreement that people’s behaviour must change for lifestyles to become more sustainable, but community leaders have struggled to engender such change. One reason for this is a failure to understand why communities change. Another reason however, is the lack of agreement over what constitutes prosperity, which is driven by the use of gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of economic and social wellbeing. Despite its dominance, GDP has been criticized for its inability to measure wellbeing, Dutch economist Jeroen van den Bergh arguing that GDP represents “an instance of government failure” which has led to “socially undesirable directions of investment and innovation”.

To reduce GDP’s dominance the 1992 Earth Summit called for new measures to be developed. Subsequently over 890 sustainability indicator sets have been established to measure prosperity. Many of these are proving useful but despite the plethora of efforts, Cawthron’s research has found their use to be sporadic, inconsistent and inadequate to measure the complex and interrelated nature of sustainability. Further, none of these have tackled the question of what prosperity is and consequently not reduced the dominance of GDP.

Cawthron’s research has concluded that existing sustainability indicator sets need to be modified or new sets developed. But instead of trying to make GDP “green”, which does not provide an answer to the whole question of sustainability, there is a need to move beyond GDP as a measure of wellbeing. Cawthron is developing such indicators through a process of community engagement. It is anticipated that through this process, not only will new measures of wellbeing be developed, but the communities themselves will start to change.

Cawthron’s research programme is 18 months into a three year programme and the research team is just commencing work with specific communities across the top of the South Island. It is expected that results will start emerging in mid-2012 with the final papers by the end of 2012.

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