Justice in sustainability indicators and indexes

At least since the Brundtland Report, technical assessments of what can be sustained and values about what is desirable to sustain, for whom, and for how long have been intertwined. This intersection is particularly evident in the assumption that justice among people living today and between present and future generations is a key part of sustainability. In official international policy documents and academic studies of sustainability, this justice may include the equitable distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, distributive justice, or the ability of people to meaningfully contribute to decisions that affect their lives, participatory justice. Yet, the process of developing indicators and indexes to track movement toward or away from sustainability has been dominated by technical, economic, and environmental assessments. This raises questions about whether or not indexes align with and thus will monitor and encourage progress toward sustainability in a technically possible and desirable way. To begin to answer this question, this paper identifies definitions of justice used in sustainability discourse and evaluates the degree to which sustainability indicators and indexes align with these concepts. The 2010 Environmental Performance Index, Eurostat's Sustainable Development Indicators, and a group of local indicators and indexes are examined. It is found that the indicators embody various aspects of justice, though they are still significantly limited by the available data, especially as they generally cannot monitor inequities between subpopulations and have a limited capacity to monitor progress toward participatory justice.