The Normative-Functional Concept of Sustainability and the Question of Indicator Weights

Abstract

Indicator sets are widely used in sustainability research and policy debates to assess the effects of sustainability policies and to rate the desirability of technology options. For instance, the German government periodically issues ‘progress reports’ showing the recent development of sustainability indicators in the country [3], while MCDA approaches use indicator sets to aggregate positive and negative characteristics of a technology to a sustainability score [4, 8]. Such applications of indicator sets are generally associated with a specific problem, that is, they pinpoint both favourable and unfavourable developments and technology characteristics; thus, any attempt to arrive at an overall conclusion inevitably requires the indicators and their underlying criteria to be weighed up against each other, thereby introducing the question of indicator weights. The article describes how the concept of normative-functional sustainabilty can be used to derive a rough classification of indicator weights.