Using Index to Measure and Monitor Progress on Sustainable Development

Abstract

Since sustainable development of a country or a region has received more and more attention recently, many countries and regions have implemented policies to ensure or protect sustainable development. For this reason, it is necessary to develop approaches to measure and monitor both the effectiveness of these policies and the progress made on sustainable development in different regions. To achieve this goal, some countries or regions have developed their own sustainable development index (SDI). On the one hand, for the country or the region itself, SDIs can provide objective information and act as a tool for assessing performances, evaluating progresses, predicting future trends and identifying priority areas in formulating policy and decision-making. On the other hand, governors and scholars also need SDIs to make comparisons of sustainable development among countries or regions, considering multidimensional variables, such as economic, environmental and social variables. Nowadays, there are different ways of measuring sustainable development which basically depend on the specified objectives of the study. One approach is to construct a SDI based on official statistics to provide an objective measure. However, this approach cannot reflect directly the opinions and feelings of the people living in the study region. Another approach is by conducting a survey. This alternative can measure the views from different sub-group population and produce indicators that can compare the sentiments amongst the sub-group population. The main challenge of measuring sustainable development is to identify policy areas, while the underlying problem is to identify and prioritize local community’s concerns and issues regarding sustainable development. In this chapter, a method of how a multi-stakeholders engagement process was applied to achieve the target is illustrated. A systematic methodology of using index to measure and monitor progress on sustainable development is also constructed after identifying priority areas. The city of Hong Kong is used as a case study to show these approaches in detail. This chapter unfolds as follows. Section 2 reviewes the relevant literatures to introduce significant issues and examples of constructing SDI at both national and regional levels. Some development millestones of SDI for Hong Kong is also included in this section. Section 3 introduces these factors often used in measuring sustainable development. The method of identifying priority areas is described briefly, and then how Hong Kong determines priority areas through this method is discussed to show operation details. Section 4 talks about the survey scheme adopted to collect the data and the structural equation modeling techinque employed to estimate the Hong Kong sustainable development index (HKSDI). Section 5 summarizes the key findings from the survey. Section 6 discusses reasons of importance and performance data for some priority areas through analyzing those key findings. Conclusions and limitations of the framework are shown in Section 7.