Towards indicators for institutional sustainability: lessons from an analysis of Agenda 21

In the course of evaluating the progress in implementing Agenda 21 [Results of the World Conference on Environment and Development: Agenda 21, UNCED United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro, United Nations, New York] the “Commission on Sustainable Development” began developing a set of indicators of sustainable development. The first version was finalised in 1996 with the suggestion of 134 indicators [Indicators of Sustainable Development, Framework and Methodologies, United Nations, New York] and put to a field test, resulting in a final version published in 2001 [Indicators of Sustainable Development: Guidelines and Methodologies, United Nations, New York]. In both versions, the indicators are divided up into for issue areas: economic, environmental, social, and institutional. The further conceptual separation into driving force, state, and response indicators was given up in the final version. lly, (inter-) governmental organisations are explicitly referred to as institutions, which in the course of decision making have to take aspects of sustainable development into consideration. The use of terms related to institutional contexts in Agenda 21 implies that the underlying understanding of institutions is broader, since it refers not only to organisations, but as well to institutional mechanisms like procedures and legal norms (formal or informal, explicit or implicit systems of rules). Applying the even more extended definition of social sciences, including institutional orientations, like societal norms and leitbilder reveals an additional wealth of institutional aspects in Agenda 21, which—as opposed to organisations and mechanisms—obviously has not been considered as institutions by the authors. ustrate this with a complete “screening” of all chapters of Agenda 21 according to all three classes of institutions. This analysis uncovers various important institutional aspects of sustainable development that are not yet reflected in the current set of indicators. They are covered by a rather complete list of institutions in Agenda 21 [Deriving Institutional Sustainability Indicators, Final Report to the German Federal Environment Agency, Research Project No. 298 121 40, Wuppertal Institute, Cologne/Berlin, p. 188]; some examples from it are provided with this paper. rmore, we present a proposal for how to structure the results of the analysis. For organisations it is obvious that not their very existence (yes/no) can be the basis for indicator development, but their effectiveness has to be the point of reference. While the DSR scheme provides no suitable analytical basis for indicator development, it offers a convenient classification scheme for results derived otherwise. This applies not only to the CSD indicators, but also for the institutional mechanisms.