Exploring 'Critical Issues' for Local Sustainability Assessment Through Community Participation

Abstract

The current indicator sets used to assess local sustainability encompass a wide range of aspects, which can lead to a superficial representation of key local issues. Despite several initiatives in local sustainability assessment, there remains a lack of knowledge on how to balance an assessment that considers multiple aspects while also focusing on specific critical aspects of local sustainability. The primary goal of this research is to explore how a subset of ‘technical’ and ‘voluntary’ indicators can be defined and used to assess critical local sustainability issues. To this end, a participatory approach was employed with the communities of three local case studies in Brazil. The results indicate that the selected objectives and the indicators effectively encompass critical aspects for local sustainability and respective communities. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the ‘voluntary’ indicators are more relevant to the citizens' monitoring. This new approach can enhance traditional local sustainability evaluations by offering a more comprehensive representation of critical local issues.

Keywords: sustainable development, local sustainability assessment, sustainability indicators, community engagement, citizen monitoring