Developing Regional Sustainability Index as a New Approach for Evaluating Sustainability Performance in Indonesia

Abstract

Sustainable development has been the subject of considerable discussion and it has attracted much attention among environmentalist, economist and policy makers. There are few studies of sustainable development measures in Indonesia, but still focused on partial dimension. This study tried to develop index to promote sustainable development assessment in Indonesia, especially at the regional (regency and municipality) level, called Regional Sustainability Index (RSI) using Factor Analysis (FA) with consideration of regional-scale spatial interdependency by employing Local Indicator of Spatial Association (LISA) statistics. There are 416 regencies and 98 municipalities in Indonesia. The data used in this study were secondary data obtained from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) in 2014. RSI was developed based on 30 regional sustainable development indicators which were divided into 3 major dimensions: economy, social, and environment. Some indicators which develop RSI is covering economic welfare, public services, infrastructure, social welfare, community health and education, physical condition, regional environmental sustainability and disaster resilience. Based on LISA results, it was found that sustainability performance of the regional-scale spatial units (regencies/municipalities) was strongly influenced by the sustainability conditions in its surrounding areas. The approach developed in this study was able to show the actual condition of regional sustainability performance in all dimensions without making it into one composite index so that it could show the index value of each dimension. According to the results, we can conclude that RSI is a very effective method to indicate the locations of the hotspot issues of sustainable development. By this index, we have a new approach for evaluating and reporting economic, social, and environmental conditions at the regional level to support the integration of three dimensions of sustainability. The study concludes that the country has attained high socioeconomic sustainability which needs to be addressed. Producing a cluster map of regencies and municipalities by combining the RSI value of each dimension is very helpful for the decision maker to determine the appropriate policy for solving the problems in each region.

How do Clusters Foster Sustainable Development? An Analysis of EU Policies

“…The concept of sustainable development (SD) is a concept of development directed towards achieving a balance between social aspects, economic activities, and the environment. The term SD is widely discussed in present political and environmental discourses [34]. Currently, most countries in the world face many sustainability challenges from youth unemployment to the aging population, climate change, pollution, sustainable energy, international migration, and rural area depopulation.…”

Assessment model of regions’ economy in the context of their sustainable development

“…The analysis of publications [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] showed a variety of methodological approaches to assess sustainable development, which is determined by the identified goals to obtain evaluations. At the same time, most of the methodological approaches involve to calculate a composite (integrated, comprehensive) index of sustainable development based on the use of additive or multiplicative convolution.…”

“…The experience of foreign scholars in solving the problems of sustainable development assessment is presented in [11][12][13][14][15][16]. In particular, paper [11] presents the author's methodology for assessing sustainable development for the Czech Republic according to four components: Political area, Social area, Economic area and Environmental area, which uses 101 output indicators and provides for the calculation of a hierarchical integral index system, which includes 12 partial indicators, 4 partial composite indicators and one aggregate integrated index of sustainable development.…”

“…It should be noted that despite the ranking of regions by the value of the integrated indicator of sustainable development, the authors were not offered a scale to estimate the level of sustainable development of regions. An alternative approach to assess the sustainable development of Indonesia's regions is given in paper [13]. It is based on a combination of factor analysis and cluster analysis methods.…”

Development of a Composite Measure of Regional Sustainable Development in Indonesia

“…In the Indonesian context, in addition to the two regional sustainable assessments previously developed by Fauzi and Oxtavianus [14] and Bakri, Rustiadi, Fauzi, and Adiwibowo [7] as discussed in Section 1, Pravitasari, Rustiadi, Mulya, and Fuadina [24] constructed regional sustainable development to assess the sustainable performance at the regency or municipal level. The researchers used 30 indicators of regional development and factor analysis as a method of measuring sustainability combined with the cluster map method to classify the regions in terms of sustainability without making a single composite index.…”