The number of sustainable development evaluation methods has proliferated during the last few years. However, they are often time consuming and expensive to conduct, making reiteration, a crucial part of assessing progress, an unappealing and difficult task. Making the results comprehensible and meaningful to the public is also challenging but essential if evaluations are to be translated into policy and action. Moreover, although such evaluations are important in assessing progress towards sustainable development, it may be hard to make them responsive to change, which is synonymous with the concept of development. Change includes both the conditions being assessed and the techniques that are used. This paper explores the crucial elements for making sustainable development evaluations work using the Bellagio principles as a framework to identify tools that can be used to implement them. These principles are interrelated and taken together can help ensure the effectiveness of sustainable development evaluations. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

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There are innumerable indicators that can be used to evaluate sustainable development and these can serve to inform and guide progress. However, they are often selected without considering their effect on each other and the achievement of sustainability. Indeed, two decades after the definition of sustainable development, there is still little agreement on principles of sustainability, nor the indicators to represent them. Part of the difficulty lies in working from a present unsustainable state to an uncertain future horizon. An alternative is to apply backcasting, which starts from a desired outcome and develops scenarios for achieving it. This paper presents a framework of sustainability principles to help operationalize indicators and increase their relevance. It outlines how this can be done using backcasting to evaluate existing indicators or to select those that relate positively to the framework principles. Although there is no formula for achieving sustainability, this process provides a format for discussion in selecting indicators and in ensuring their continued relevance to sustainable development progress.

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