Title: A NAIADE based approach for sustainability benchmarking

Authors: Giuseppe Munda

Addresses: Department of Economics and Economic History, Edifici B and Institute for Environmental Sciences and Technologies, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra 08193, Barcelona, Spain

Abstract: Sustainability management and planning is mainly a social decision process about the desired future of a given city, region or country. A possible reduction of the unavoidable complexity, present in this type of problems, consists in considering explicitly non-equivalent representations which arise in the interaction between the various observer subjects and the different systemic levels considered. The reduction of the number of non-equivalent representations leads us to the use of descriptors such as indicators and indexes. Then a question arises: how could such indicators be used for policy making? This paper presents a multicriteria framework, aimed at helping real-world policy processes, for the benchmarking of sustainability indicators.

Keywords: sustainability indicators; mathematical aggregation conventions; NAIADE method; social multicriteria evaluation; policy making; benchmarking; decision making; ustainability management; sustainability planning; sustainable development; environmental management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJETM.2006.008253

International Journal of Environmental Technology and Management, 2006 Vol.6 No.1/2, pp.65 - 78

Published online: 26 Nov 2005 *

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