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This paper discusses methodologies that have been employed to give insights into business performance in relation to sustainable development, both at a sectoral and corporate level. From consideration of different sectoral sustainable development methodologies, some key issues and good practice related to their derivation are elaborated. These issues are then further illustrated by a detailed comparison between three sustainable development methodologies that have been used in the UK offshore oil and gas industry. The methodologies chiefly differ in terms of how they address the problem of comparing different impacts across potentially non-commensurable dimensions, one proceeding through explicit monetary valuation, another through implicit valuation of different options and another through presentation of an unaggregated framework of indicators. The paper concludes by identifying the different situations in which use of these different methodologies is appropriate.

Abstract:Where the public acceptability of a policy can influence its chance of success, it is important to anticipate and mitigate potential concerns. This paper applies search frequency analysis and a form of claims-making analysis to identify public acceptability concerns among fourteen policies proposed by the EU-funded DYNAMIX project to achieve EU resource efficiency. Key points of contention in the corresponding public discourses focus primarily on trust, fairness, effectiveness and cost. We use our findings to provide specific recommendations for the design and implementation of the proposed policy mix which are intended to improve the public acceptability of contentious aspects, and highlight some broader insights for policymakers.

Policy makers are often called upon to navigate between scientists' urgent calls for long-term concerted action to reduce the environmental impacts due to resource use, and the public's concerns over policies that threaten lifestyles or jobs. Against these political challenges, resource efficiency policy making is often a changeable and even chaotic process, which has fallen short of the political ambitions set by democratically elected governments. This article examines the importance of paradigms in understanding how the public collectively responds to new policy proposals, such as those developed within the project DYNAmic policy MiXes for absolute decoupling of environmental impact of EU resource use from economic growth (DYNAMIX). The resulting proposed approach provides a framework to understand how different concerns and worldviews converge within public discourse, potentially resulting in paradigm change. Thus an alternative perspective on how resource efficiency policy can be development is proposed, which envisages early policies to lay the ground for future far-reaching policies, by altering the underlying paradigm context in which the public receive and respond to policy. The article concludes by arguing that paradigm change is more likely if the policy is conceived, framed, designed, analyzed, presented, and evaluated from the worldview or paradigm pathway that it seeks to create (i.e., the destination paradigm).