The social sustainability of the SATs: A proposal of indicators for their evaluation

Abstract

Rural entities governed by the behavioral principles of the social economy could promote sustainable local development in the geographical spaces in which they are located and contribute to the achievement of integral sustainability on a global scale. To make this purpose a reality, indicators are needed that allow for their evaluation and follow-up, and that contemplate the specific attributes of the different families of the third sector. The objective of this work is to propose metrics that make possible to monitor the social value for the sustainability of a particular form of agrarian associationism of the Spanish juridical system for which specific social indicators have not yet been designed, the Agrarian Societies of Transformation (AST). The geographical context of the study is the Canary Islands archipelago, an ultraperipheral region of the European Union, and an important international tourist destination. From the ATS of the insular group, one has been taken as a case study, and Social Accounting has been used as a system that enables the development of specific social indicators. The essential contribution of this work is that it establishes metrics that allow the monitoring of the contribution to social sustainability of a group of entities for which they do not yet exist. In later developments, such indicators could be tested in other entities of the same nature in order to have a set of minimums applicable to this family of social economy entities.