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International Journal of Social Research Methodology
Vol. 13, No. 1, February 2010, 41–53
Accounting for sustainability: combining qualitative and
quantitative research in developing ‘indicators’ of sustainability Andy Scerri* and Paul James
Global Cities Research Institute, RMIT University, 411 Swanston St., GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001, Australia Ta T y S lo R r M a _ nd A _ F 3 r 8an 6 c 5 i 8 s 6 .L s t g d m
(Received 26 August 2008; final version received 4 March 2009) 1 Ia0 n 1 O 2 T 0 D .t 3r 0a 0 1 e 6i 0y . d 0 r4 gi 9l 0 y.8 n-n o Ar 0s 0 a nt 5a 0c /i 5l2 de1 o 7 & 0 yr 3 n 9 AF 0 S ri 6 a ( rtr9 c 4 l p ia e @ 5 Jr cl nr r 5 o ie ci m7 u ntsit0 r)/. 9 na 1 e 0 l4 d 2 6 u.8 of 4a 6 -u 4 S5 1 o3 4 ci 0 5 a 0 l (R o e n s l e i a n r e c ) h Methodology
Indicators-based projects are currently central to many local, city-wide, national
and international sustainability initiatives. The quantitative basis of many such
projects means that achieving sustainability through them is often undertaken as a
technical task. The size, scope and sheer number of indicators included within
many such projects means that they are often unwieldy and resist effective
implementation. Arguably, the techno-scientific ‘edge’ inherent in them tends to
blur the possibilities for bringing into question the structures of power and criteria
by which values are translated into practice. It limits the way that a community
may use indicators to support sustainable practices or to challenge unsustainable
practices. The article discusses some of the methodological issues that arise when
setting out to develop and implement qualitative indicators of sustainability that
incorporate some quantitative metrics. This alternative approach involves people
in actively learning and negotiating over how best to put sustainability into
practice. The aim of such a research method is to engage citizens in the job of
achieving sustainability as a task of itself, undertaken on terms acceptable to them
in the context of the communities in which they live.
Keywords: sustainability; community; qualitative and quantitative research; mixed methods; indicators
Bringing together qualitative with quantitative approaches in community studies and
development is one of the key methodological issues in the field. This article focuses
upon some of the theoretical problems raised by indicators-centred research into
sustainable development. It does so from within a perspective that sees ecological
challenges as creating a pressing need to bridge practically the gulf between ‘natural’
and ‘social’ science. Over recent decades, indicators-based projects have become
central to a broad range of community development and policy-oriented social
research, particularly research which aims to engender or evaluate community sustain-
ability or resilience. Indeed, it has been argued that ‘growth in the use of sustainability
indicators is nothing short of phenomenal’ (Morel-Journel, Duchene, Coanus, &
Martinais, 2003, p. 582). This growth can be seen as a consequence of the ‘globaliza-
tion’ of comparative measurement as it is extended horizontally across the world and
vertically from neighbourhood to international policy-making. Often primarily
quantitative in approach, indicators-based projects are extremely valuable tools for
measuring where a community ‘is at’ in relation to some or other given concept of
*Corresponding author. Email: andy.scerri@rmit.edu.au
ISSN 1364-5579 print/ISSN 1464-5300 online © 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13645570902864145 http://www.informaworld.com 42 A. Scerri and P. James
‘sustainable development’ (see, for example, World Commission on Environment and
Development, 1987, p. 43). However, much research seems to draw a line around
empirical ‘indicators’, as if this were enough (Global Reporting Initiative, 2006). The
problem is that concentrating on indicators-in-themselves fails to bring into question
the nature of the human relationships, including the interweaving of the objective and
the subjective, that go into creating and reproducing a community on sustainable
terms. The suggestion developed here is that indicators-based projects – measuring
and assessing ‘well-being’, ‘inclusion’ or ‘cohesion’, for example as signposts for
‘sustainability’ – are in certain ways displacing concerns with understanding commu-
nity as a lived condition of negotiated outcomes.
A key concern is that many indicators-centred projects present a relatively abstract
view of things. Of course, all understandings of social life take the form of knowl-
edges that, through observation or participation, are abstracted from lived conditions.
Our suggestion is that the type of abstraction characterizing many quantitative
indicators-based projects is a problem. Emphasis on indicators per se tends to privi-
lege technique over reflexively engaging people in the job of creating and reproducing
of a sustainable community over time. Research across a broad range of such projects,
in cities and rural areas and across both Global South and North, has found that devel-
oping sustainability indicators is often undertaken as a relatively technical task. This
is may be in part an effect of what Ann Singleton correctly identifies, in other fields,
as the ‘positivist imperative … driving a thirst for statistical data’ (1999, p. 156). It
often seems that the problem of achieving sustainability is being dealt with as a
‘purely’ technical one: generating the right indicators and then tailoring the solution
in order to get the indicators ‘back on track’. By contrast, our argument is that indica-
tors-centred research can make a greater contribution to understanding and practicing
sustainability when seen as part of a broader approach to how persons engage with
each other and on what terms. Towards the end of the present article, we report on one
case study of the approach in practice, a pilot study that situates quantitative indicators
in the context of broader qualitative concerns as negotiated and developed by
participants in the research process.
Interweaving the quantitative and qualitative
In privileging technique over reflexively engaging in the world, indicators-based
projects often seem to perpetuate a particular set of epistemological and ontological
assumptions concerning human situatedness in the world. At risk of caricaturing
important and helpful efforts aimed at achieving sustainability, it does seem that some
indicators-centred approaches embed particular ideas or beliefs about the social within
the research task as if these are substantive empirical claims. One example is the
tendency for indicators projects to see the social world as a closed system possessing
system-like properties. Of course at one (very abstract) level, the entire globe is a
relatively closed system. However, we argue that such a perspective privileges the vain
possibility that the life-world of a community or city is objectively knowable as a
closed system. Research premised upon understanding the social in terms of ‘system
differentiation’ tends to assume that an apolitical metaphor of ‘harmonious inter-
change’ can characterize human activities (Alexander, 2006, p. 33). A question
emerges as to what kinds of forces would need to be deployed in order to create a world
where conformity with system requirements is enforced? It remains arguable that such
a situation would more than likely result in deeply unjust, and as such unsustainable,
International Journal of Social Research Methodology 43
outcomes (Plumwood, 1999). We suggest that it is precisely in our capacity to evaluate
critically and even sometimes disrupt the conforming interchange of power and value
that efforts to understand and practise sustainability need to be understood.
It does seem that, albeit with the best of intentions, the current spate of indicators-
centred projects tends towards an unreflective emphasis on the formalism of quantita-
tive research methodologies. Taking Charles Tilly’s somewhat ironic point, it is
important that applying formalisms in research should not mean ‘conforming to a
single dominant understanding of how the world works’. Rather, social research
should combine and interweave quantitative and qualitative formalisms as modes of a
research process. This would allow researchers to ‘distinguish between totally inade-
quate and less inadequate representations of social processes, thus opening the way to
increasingly reliable knowledge’ (Tilly, 2004, pp. 597, 600). Put in terms of a social
research problem, it may be that indicators-centred projects move from quantitative
datasets, taken up from areas as diverse as climatology, health sciences or economet-
rics, to making qualitative claims about human experiences such as exposure to
sunlight, well-being or quality of life. As Julia Brannen recognizes, even though
researchers are experiencing an increased emphasis upon ‘research which takes an
action perspective’, this does not necessarily mean that ‘quantitative research is being
displaced’ (2005, p. 175). We suggest that many of the assumptions central to
quantitative research are becoming subtly normalized in the area of community
sustainability, and spilling over into social research in taken-for-granted ways.
A number of relatively recent indicators-based projects, themselves based on
systems-theorizing, do recognize and attend to this issue, but too often social relations
are reduced to a distinguishable abstract thing called ‘the human factor’. For example,
Joanna Becker argues that there are sufficient similarities between living or biological
systems and social systems, such that the latter may be understood on the same terms
as the former. In this view, ‘healthy social systems … consist of a diversity of inter-
dependent but self-sufficient entities appropriate in scale and low in entropy so as to
provide stability and durability while at the same time being responsive to the
uncertainty and fragility of evolutionary succession’ (Becker, 2005, p. 99). Here, the
seemingly innocent word ‘healthy’ signifies the presence of untheorized, a priori and
framing meta-claims about the positive benefits of diversity, the self-sufficient inter-
dependency of atomistic units, and the applicability of evolutionary succession to
social life. Similarly, although recognizing the need in indicators projects for what
Simon Bell and Stephen Morse call a ‘circular “soft” approach of beneficiary learn-
ing’ (cited in Becker, 2005), Becker’s application of systems-theory tends to be
unidirectional. It privileges an understanding of systems that can simply be known in
their entirety. In this case, obscured behind the meta-assumptions of systems-
theorizing is the need for cities or communities to deal adequately with disputes over
pressing human issues that often run contradictory to predicted system expectations.
Some examples include the possibility that members of a community might legiti-
mately and sustainably call for homogeneity, as against diversity; demand measures
to institute strong other-reliance, by contrast with self-sufficient interdependency or,
demand forms of exclusion to preserve difference and identity.
A similar example is found in work by John Peet and Hartmut Bossel, who
propose an ‘ethics-based systems approach to indicators of sustainable development’.
As with Becker, Peet and Bossel emphasize how ‘a participatory process is essential,
to ensure that both knowledge and value are appropriately incorporated into
the process’ of developing indicators of sustainability. However, their set of ‘basic 44 A. Scerri and P. James
orientors’ – existence, psychological needs, effectiveness, freedom, security, adapt-
ability and coexistence – frame the participatory choice of indicators by a community
(Peet and Bossel, 2000, pp. 224–225). Once more in this example, it is suggested that
certain meta-theoretical assumptions pervade the approach, which may in practice
remove from a community the capacity to debate and ‘learn’ from indicators projects.
Our discussion later in the present article of Janus-faced social themes is intended to
address this problem. One clue to the kind of problem we are raising here is found in
recognizing that Peet and Bossel elevate the ecological challenge to the position of a
working deontological principle in itself. While recognizing that the ‘sustainability
moral postulate’ is ‘entirely sensible and reasonable for most people’ (p. 233), posit-
ing some or other deontological ethical principle of sustainability on the basis of this
claim obscures the actual problem. That is, positing a deontological principle of
sustainability performs the feat of abstraction that allows the social to be observed as
a system. By contrast, the approach developed here recognizes that the problem of
establishing sustainability arises precisely at the point where debating and negotiating
over the ethical principles to be applied breaks down.
Contributing to citizenship as a ‘learning condition’
Social theorist Gerard Delanty argues in the pages of International Journal of Social
Research Methodology that, ‘Science is increasingly becoming a communicative
system that interacts reflexively with society’ (2002, p. 83). This understanding of
scientific knowledge, which encapsulates both its natural orientation and its social
framing, is important. As the threats posed by climate change to the sustainability of
human society become increasingly urgent, ‘natural’ scientific knowledge about the
environment becomes increasingly relevant to ‘social’ (including scientific) concerns
with sustainability. Indeed, as philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre recognizes (1977),
natural scientific knowledge is increasingly being produced and acted upon in ways
that respond to and represent concerns hitherto seen as part of the ambit of the social
sciences and by extension, the humanities. Indeed, all kinds of scientific knowledges
are increasingly being politicized by being subjected to external (i.e. social) evalua-
tion and critique, as well as being de-mystified insofar as the ecological challenge
normalizes the place of relatively abstract information within social life. Delanty’s
point can thus be understood to mean that contemporary membership in a commu-
nity needs to be partially re-conceived on procedural terms: that is, citizenship needs
to be better understood as a ‘learning’ condition. This is an argument that Delanty
himself takes up in relation to a concept of ‘cultural citizenship’, developed through
engagement in social practices aimed at fostering ‘communicative competencies’ (2003, p. 558).
Thus, the social sciences have come to occupy an ‘interpretive space’ in society.
At least since the Rio Summit and Brundltand reports, the knowledges created by the
social sciences are increasingly called upon by policy-makers as a means for preparing
societies for climate change, and for developing sustainable ways of living. In this
view, social scientific knowledges, especially when combined in research with knowl-
edge from the ‘natural’ sciences, constitute part of what Peter Wagner sees as ‘part of
the discursive self-understanding of social life’. What is important about these under-
standings is that they not only help to de-mystify scientific knowledge and represent
it as a part of social life, but they also help to break down what is a legitimacy deficit
between natural and social science forms of knowledge (Wagner, 2001, p. 36). Seeing
International Journal of Social Research Methodology 45
things in this way, however, raises a pressing issue that is directly related to the use of
indicators in sustainability research: social science methods are fundamentally
different from those used in the natural sciences. As Bent Flyvbjerg argues, natural
science deals with explanation and predictability, and thus can supply information, at
which social science has been exceedingly bad. Social science moreover deals reflex-
ively with power and values, and the interests and institutions that sustain them in the
social world. For Flyvbjerg, social scientific knowledge ‘is important because it is that
activity by which instrumental-rationality is balanced by value-rationality, because
such balancing is crucial to the sustained happiness of the citizens in any society’
(2001, p. 3). In calling for social scientific research to be (self-)understood as the
activity of constituting, sustaining and elaborating value-rationality, Flyvbjerg calls
for contextualism and a ‘situational ethics’ over relativism or foundationalism (p. 4).
That is, Flyvbjerg eschews both postmodernism and conventional realism as episte-
mologies, for an understanding of social research as a self-reflexive exercise that can
be defined in terms of developing and propagating value-consciousness. Thus, he
argues that the ‘goal [of social scientific understanding] is one of contributing to
society’s capacity for value-rational deliberation and action’ (pp. 130, 167).
In the argument developed here through the work of Delanty, Wagner and
Flyvbjerg, ‘information’ refers to data-type material, whether derived or developed
using quantitative or qualitative means. Alternatively, ‘knowledge’ refers to (neces-
sarily) value-laden claims about information and its uses within the social universe.
Based on this delineation, we aim to recognize the value of quantitative approaches
while adopting a fundamentally different approach to indicators-centred research
from that conventionally deployed. Our point is not to suggest that ‘natural’ scien-
tific understandings of the physical universe are unimportant. Indeed, such ‘natural’
scientific information, about resources or processes within ecosystems, for example,
are essential to recognizing sources of unsustainability. Rather, our suggestion is
that ‘natural’ sciences need to be drawn upon in the context of conditions that are
also understood as being loaded with largely unpredictable ecological, economic,
cultural and political possibilities – that is, social possibilities. From this perspective,
the embrace of ‘indicators’ as both means and ends can be criticized as representing
a form of resurgent one-dimensional positivism. Social research should recognize
that problématiques tend to remain open, rather than are resolved by a specific
‘scientific’ solution (Wagner, 2001, p. 8). This, it is argued, raises possibilities for
developing qualitative indicators of sustainability that can de-mystify ‘natural’
science as it facilitates reflecting upon and learning about how prevailing values and
practices can and do impact upon a community’s capacity to practise sustainable development.
In these respects, the authors recognize the important contributions of ‘ecological
economics’ and other quantifying techniques for developing indicators of sustainabil-
ity. The intention is to take the quantitative approaches further, beyond the abstracting
task of measuring and assessing, and out into the field so to speak, as a community
‘engaged’ set of practices (Mulligan & Nadarajah, 2008). The approach is therefore
designed with an image of human activity as situated within and reflexively reconsti-
tuting the ecosphere. It understands indicators in ecologically complex terms, as ‘not
merely represent[ing] reality; they have the potential to change the relationships
between people and between humans and nature, thereby changing people and chang-
ing nature’ (A. Gare, The Scientific Status of Environmental Accounting Methodolo-
gies, personal communication, March 3, 2008). What is suggested, in summary, is that 46 A. Scerri and P. James
problems of ‘technique’ need to take a back seat to the task of negotiating the form
and content of the relations in and through which people create and reproduce a
community’s social life (Allan & Phillipson, 2008).
Accounting for sustainability in practice
Before discussing the approach in detail through a worked example, it is important
briefly to draw attention to one more practical aspect of it. One of the outcomes of
both an increasing interest in sustainability and the predominance of economic
language in policy-making is that many indicators-centred urban development
projects work from within a model first developed in economics as an add-on to the
bottom line of profit – the ‘triple bottom-line’ model. In general, these approaches aim
to measure impacts upon the economic, social and environmental ‘bottom lines’ of
organizations, communities and regions as if they were corporate entities. Too often,
for example, a city is treated as a discrete functional unit, much like a business firm,
with inputs and outputs, ‘internalities’ and ‘externalities’. By inference, triple bottom-
line approaches are problematic for many, simply because unquestioningly they set
the norms, values and ideologies associated with the capitalist market-economy in
pride of place when evaluating sustainability. This said, and however one feels about
such criticism, it does help to clarify an important issue: triple bottom-line approaches
often assume a strong commensurability of values between and across different
domains of human social practice (Martinez-Alier, 2002). These approaches tend to
presume that economic, social and environmental sustainability are either commensu-
rable a priori of other considerations, or that the economic domain (which in
conditions of globalizing capitalism grants primacy to efficiency and growth) provides
the basis for translating between them. For example, instead of treating the ecological
as having its own imperatives, the environment becomes an economic ‘externality’:
another cost to be considered when engaging in economic activity.
Thus, instead of treating domains of social practice, such as the economy,
separately from the social, the approach discussed here starts with ‘the social’ and
conceptually divides it into four domains of practice: the economic, the ecological, the
political and the cultural. This decision is not designed to relegate the social to a
background feature of human practice but, rather, deliberately places sociality at the
centre of the challenge of achieving sustainability. This means treating the economy
as one domain of social life, rather than as something separated from the social. The
economy has its own intrinsic rules, norms and values, which often mean that
practices grounded in them encroach upon or affect the sustainability of life-world
conditions more generally conceived. It also means treating the ecological as a social
question, rather than an ‘objective’ issue manifest in an external ‘Nature’. A working
definition of each domain follows:
The economic domain is defined in terms of activities associated with the produc-
tion, exchange, consumption, organization and distribution of goods and services.
The ecological domain is defined as the intersection between social practice and
the environment, and focuses upon human engagement with and within the non- human world.
The political domain is defined in terms of what goes into the activity of
organizing, over time and in a particular space, rules, norms and projected
practices for life held-in-common.
International Journal of Social Research Methodology 47
The cultural domain is defined in terms of practices, discourses and material
objects that express commonalities and differences, continuities and discontinu- ities of meaning over time.
The approach therefore sets into relief tensions between (generative) values that arise
across different domains of practice: for example, between ensuring economic security
and the innovatory impetus of economic risks; between demands for political authority
and participation, between ecological limits and human needs and, between culturally
beneficial inclusion and exclusion, for example, which need to be answered in relation
to each domain. Such tensions, which cross all the domains, are characterized as
‘social themes’ within the applied approach. Meanwhile, it aims to develop an under-
standing of the need for comparability across (particular) domains – that is, across the
different ways in which such tensions are negotiated. This is not to suggest that the
four domains are in practice separable spheres of activity. Rather, the point is that it
is analytically and practically useful to treat sustainability in these terms because it is
helpful for undertaking the difficult task of negotiating over what needs to change and
what needs to stay the same, as well as how to indicate degrees of sustainability in this
process. (In theoretical terms, suggesting an approach that grapples with ‘the social’
in terms of domains or spheres of practice that follow and produce their own rules,
norms and values builds upon work by Michael Walzer (1983) and Luc Boltanski and
Eve Chiapello (2005) and Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot (2006).)
The approach therefore aims to provide a means by which people can both account
for using quantitative information about sustainability, and account for sustainability
in qualitative terms of agreeing upon what this requires: in terms of changing or rein-
forcing established rules, norms and values. Discussion now turns to focus upon a
specific worked example; a case study of the two-level ‘Accounting for Sustainability’
approach in practice. The approach is currently being piloted in Melbourne, Australia
and Vancouver, Canada: it is a work in progress conducted under the auspices of the
United Nations Global Compact-Cities Programme. In order to present things
concisely, the present article concentrates upon the Melbourne project, which at the
time of writing has advanced further than the project in Vancouver. The point of
contact in Melbourne was the Sustainability Team of a progressive city council, which
engaged the researchers to develop the Accounting for Sustainability approach for the
resident-focussed portion of the city’s umbrella ‘Eco-City Strategy’ to reduce waste
and emissions. The residential portion of the strategy focuses upon minimizing house-
hold water and electricity usage and waste reduction. The point of contact in Vancou-
ver has been a university department and, through academics there, the local regional
authority. A considerable amount of preparatory work has been carried out in Vancou-
ver, and research there has focussed upon the emphasis within the approach upon
fostering value-based thinking on sustainability issues. This first level of the project
is guided by two background considerations:
What kinds of things indicate that a community is sustainable?
What kinds of things indicate that (when present or missing) a community is unsustainable?
Initially, the Sustainability Team was asked to consider Council’s undertaking of the
Eco-city Strategy in terms of four questions (see Figure 1). 48 A. Scerri and P. James Figure 1.
The method is presented in graphic terms, providing a working record for research-
ers, participants and project funding bodies/policy-makers. Figure 1.
The method is presented in graphic terms, providing a working record for researchers, participants and project funding bodies/policy-makers.
Hence, Level One began a process of re-thinking the practices and procedures that can
make or break sustainability initiatives. Grounded in a sustainability ‘self-assessment’
task, this is designed to get the process moving by fostering production of a ‘social
map’ in relation to which possible indicators to be applied within each of the four
domains of practice will be selected.1 The researchers assessed responses to each of
the four questions in relation to each of the four domains of practice. Evidence for
claims made in relation to each question was provided in the form of policy
documents and statements, governmental, institutional and externally generated
reports, legislation and by-laws, quantitative data such as statistics and the results of
International Journal of Social Research Methodology 49
public opinion polls, minutes of meetings and records of community meetings, town
planning sessions and council meetings. This took place in conjunction with a series
of ‘strategic’ interviews, designed to establish some of the ‘subjective’ understandings
and expectations of the Eco-city project held within Council and by the Sustainability Team itself.
The key assessment tool used by the researchers in Level One was a qualitative
ranking of overall awareness at the outset of the project of what working to achieve
sustainability will involve, and how will this be understood or ‘indicated’. The ranking
process was conducted by the researchers along a scale of 1–5 from unsatisfactory,
minimal, satisfactory, good to excellent in relation to each domain of practice, and
presented to the Sustainability Team as a benchmark for the project. While such rank-
ings, are represented graphically in quantitative terms the primary mode of reporting
to Council was discursive. A key finding reported in this early stage of the project was
that there exists something of a miss-fit between Council’s self-understanding of
sustainability as a holistic issue (the Eco-city strategy understands the ‘city as an
ecosystem’) and its attempts to achieve sustainability. In short, great emphasis has
been placed upon understanding the ‘environmental’ and ‘economic’ impacts of not
acting, while little work has been done to assess the beneficial or negative impacts of
acting to achieve sustainability in these areas. Meanwhile, Council has been largely
unprepared for the emergence of political problems in relation to the strategy,
and seemed to understand cultural issues purely in terms of web-based modes of ‘community engagement’.
Simultaneously, the researchers undertook to organize and convene a Critical
Reference Group (CRG) for the project. Conscious of the (almost intractable) problem
of merely replicating existing social structures, such as hierarchies and vested
interests, the group is made up of members of council, including planners, engineers
and community-outreach workers, civil society organizations and business managers
or owners from within the city, including representatives from the electricity and
water utilities, and academics. The role of the group was to provide feedback on the
unrolling of the project, and to discuss and debate possible shortcomings as these
developed, while establishing the basic framework for engaging residents in the city
in efforts to develop the quantitative indicators. This strategic part of the project serves
as a guide and provides an overview of city objectives and hopes for the project. It
specifically aims to identify participants and those affected by the eventual implemen-
tation of the indicators sets. In summary, this initial stage built-up a profile of the city
in relation to the Eco-city objectives, and aimed to situate the city and its strategy as
part of ‘society’ as a whole. Level One thus began the process of defining participants
and engaging them in negotiating what it is that requires ‘indicating’, and how or
under what conditions such indicators are to be implemented as targets (to be aimed
for) or base lines (to be moved on from). In consultation with the CRG it was decided
that a series of public meetings and stalls at public events such as fairs and a question-
naire was to be distributed to householders in the weeks preceding Earth Hour in
April 2009. The aim is to better understand householders’ expectations about what
was to be indicated and how, and to foster community awareness and learning in ways
that would eventually lead to the establishment of a quantitative indicators set for the project.
Hence, the step from Level One to Two of the approach actively establishes the
basis for public participation in the indicators-centred development project. The aim
of Level Two is to move beyond ‘feel-good talk of “participation”’ (Cornwall, 2000), 50 A. Scerri and P. James
and ground an ‘“informatization” process that builds collective community
knowledge encompassing hard and measurable trends and facts as well as soft and
unmeasurable values and perceptions’ (Holden, 2006, p. 179). Level Two is therefore
designed as a platform for contesting, negotiating and defining what it is that sustain-
ability will encompass and entail, and what are the particular limitations of this project
in relation to this global goal. Level Two involves a double process of negotiation; the
aim of going beyond ‘traditional’ indicators is to prompt negotiating over what consti-
tutes knowledge about how best to practice city-life, and to involve people in learning
about and doing sustainability in the presence of quantitative indicators, such as those
that measure electricity or water use, for example. The key point is that it is only by
engaging in the task of deliberating over the norms and values that frame possibilities
for implementing indicators that they can guide sustainable development in practice.
Hence, the two guiding considerations from Level One are complemented by two
further background considerations:
Who benefits and who loses in the current situation, and how might this be changed?
What does it mean, in relation to current norms, to negotiate these matters?
The background considerations in Level Two were asked of the Sustainability Team,
the CRG and, in line with consultations with these two groups, is central to the
community questionnaire to be distributed preceding Earth Hour. Level Two thus
elicits reflection upon how some of the most important over-arching issues that inform
city-life, in the context of wider social conditions, might contribute to or detract from
the twin goals of raising awareness of and acting to achieve sustainability. In Level
Two, emphasis upon community participation is partly reversed, and the Sustainabil-
ity Team takes on the role of an external agency that – from the perspective of
residents – acts to broker the parameters of the residential emissions reduction strat-
egy. Level Two also involves researchers in ranking from 1–5 the overall project’s
capacity for improving sustainability objectives. Again, while graphic representation
is quantitative (see Figure 1), the primary outcome of Level Two is discursively
presented and will centre on a report to council in May 2009.
In moving to Level Two a considerable amount of time has been required to move
the project from the social map to identifying major tensions, problems and blockages.
As a way of taking this second level of the project further, the researchers then
injected into the ongoing discussion with the CRG four dialogical ‘social themes’ (see
above), with the aim of using this as a framework for negotiating the boundaries
within which the indicators of sustainability may be established in consultation with
the wider community. Presented in the form of a pair of related concepts, these social
themes help draw attention to sources of tension across different domains of practice.
(In theoretical terms, this move by the researchers raises epistemological-normative
questions about the ‘need for foundations’, and the strength or weakness of founda-
tional arguments in relation to providing positive ‘answers’ to social problems.)
The researchers have called upon the Sustainability Team to reflect upon and
substantiate the overall Eco-city strategy in relation to a tension between the need for
political participation (in selecting and implementing practices around indicators of
residential emissions) and authority (i.e. the scientific authority implicit in quantita-
tive indicators and the authority of council to under-gird the implementation process,
or even to establish the need for sustainability as a social goal). The assumption here
International Journal of Social Research Methodology 51
is not that participation is better than authority, or vice versa. Rather, what is being
brought into question is the degree to which people participating in social life can do
so in a meaningful way, and how they do so in relation to the forms of authority and
values exercised within their city, and against those applied within the city but having
their source outside or beyond it, in national laws or international treaties, such as the
Kyoto Protocol. In short, a tension between participation and authority manifests itself
around the application of principles (indicators drawn from the ‘natural’ sciences) for
social practice, and this needs to be negotiated dialogically if satisfactory responses to
the problem of sustainability are to be reached. Conclusion
As quantitative indicators-based projects are increasingly rolled-out by government at
all levels, as well as by non-governmental organizations, this article has argued for an
approach that balances such quantitative indicators – ‘facts’, such as metrics, that a
community needs to move away from or towards if it is to achieve sustainability –
with qualitative indicators that highlight the nature of community as a negotiated
condition. A key assumption of the article has been that the ecological challenge posed
by climate change creates a need for theory and practice that bridges the gap between
‘natural’ scientific information and ‘social’ scientific knowledges. An axiomatic claim
throughout has been that ‘natural’ scientific facts are not ‘value free’, and that the
‘social’ sciences have a central role to play in dealing with the values, norms and rules
of social life that are affected as communities act upon ‘natural’ scientific information.
In short, the article has addressed the methodological issue of the status of scientific
knowledges, whether drawn from the ‘natural’ or ‘social’ sciences, in applied research and practice.
The approach discussed in the article eschews a blanket concept of ‘society’.
Instead, it favours a dynamic understanding of social life conducted across four
domains of practice. The task of acting to achieve sustainability in relation to quanti-
tative indicators is thus conceptualized in terms of the effects that such actions can
have upon economic, political, cultural and ecological relations. As the framework for
an initial level of community engagement, approaching things in this way provides a
means for qualitatively assessing what quantitative indicators may require of a
community across these four domains of practice. A community’s self-understanding
of what sustainability requires is in this way tempered by the demands that quantita-
tive indicators make, and is ranked in terms degrees of awareness of (the need for and
importance of) sustainability. By further formalizing the nature of the social tensions
raised by the need to achieve sustainability, as this is measured by quantitative indi-
cators, a second level of community engagement offers a means for assessing how and
under what conditions a community might implement these as ‘targets’ or ‘base lines’.
This second level of the approach is designed as a tool for qualitatively ranking and,
so, indicating how well or badly a community is negotiating the kinds of tensions that
working to achieve sustainability raises.
Thus, the article has presented an approach that links quantitative indicators with
qualitative rankings, in the form of a tool through which community representatives
can account for the use of quantitative information about sustainability, as well as
account for sustainability to community members by facilitating citizen participation
and engagements aimed at agreeing upon what this will require. In these ways, the
approach discussed in the article combines quantitative with qualitative indicators of 52 A. Scerri and P. James
community sustainability in an approach that frames the ‘facts’ – such as residential
emissions levels – in normative terms, as prompts to a community’s self-reflexive –
that is, self-assessing – engagement in efforts to change or reinforce established ways of doing things. Acknowledgement
The authors thank Meg Holden, Martin Mulligan, Liam Magee, as well as Stephanie McCarthy
and Caroline Bayliss of the UN Global Compact Cities Programme, and Alex Fearnside,
Michaela Lang and the Critical Reference Group of the City of Melbourne’s Residential Sustainability Project. Note 1.
‘Social mapping’, as a method, has been used in projects across Australia, Indonesia,
Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste. It involves asking people to plot
out where they see the boundaries of their locale, their community or communities, and
their responses to process of interchange that cross that space. This is used to refine under-
standings of space, community, polity and place. It involves walking with and talking to
people as they move through defined spaces, and seeing how their understandings and
shaping of their world is informed via their interactions and movements. Social mapping
in the first instance is geared towards the overall project objectives, and then related with
the social themes used in the project. These are interpreted in terms of a series of layers of
social analysis that draw upon the theoretical levels of the applied research methodology,
research thus moving from the empirical to the abstract and back again in a constant
journey of return, testing each level against the others. Notes on contributors
Andy Scerri is Research Fellow in the Community Sustainability Programme at the Global
Cities Research Institute and also works closely with the team at the Globalism Research
Centre, both at RMIT. His research interests are in environmental sociology and politics and
research methods in the fields of community development and sustainability, and in theories of
individualism, subjectivity and citizenship in the West.
Paul James is Director of the Global Cities Research Institute (RMIT) and Director of the UN
Global Compact-Cities Programme. He is also Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diver-
sity in the Globalism Research Centre and an editor of Arena Journal. He has delivered invited
addresses in over 20 countries and is author or editor of 19 books including most importantly,
Nation Formation (Sage, 1996) and Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism (Sage, 2006). His
recent books include the first eight volumes of a projected 16-volume series mapping the field
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