Abstract
This paper argues that the need for a core “fourth pillar” of sustainability/sustainable development, as demanded in multiple arenas, can no longer be ignored on the grounds of intangibility. Different approaches to this vital but missing pillar (cultural-aesthetic, religious-spiritual, and political-institutional) find common ground in the area of ethical values. While values and aspects based on them are widely assumed to be intangible and immeasurable, we illustrate that it is possible to operationalize them in terms of measurable indicators when they are intersubjectively conceptualized within clearly defined practical contexts. The processes require contextual localization of items, which can nonetheless fit into a generalizable framework. This allows useful measurements to be made, and removes barriers to studying, tracking, comparing, evaluating and correlating values-related dimensions of sustainability. It is advocated that those involved in operationalizing sustainability (especially in the context of creating post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals), should explore the potential for developing indicators to capture some of its less tangible aspects, especially those concerned with ethical values.
Highlights
IntroductionJon Hawkes makes this case explicitly in his book The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s Essential Role in Public
The project brought together representatives of two academic research institutions and four civil society organizations (CSOs) as equal partners, and was innovative in the extent of decision-making power granted to the CSO partners within the research consortium
Since the measurements obtained in the case study were useful to the team of facilitators, we suggest that Conclusion 2 might be enhanced by the addition of the word ―usefully‖, : ―Values enactment can be usefully operationalized as measurable indicators within a clearly defined practical context‖
Summary
Jon Hawkes makes this case explicitly in his book The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s Essential Role in Public. The ESDinds project, which aimed to develop values-based indicators and assessment tools for civil society organizations promoting education for sustainable development, was funded by the European. The project brought together representatives of two academic research institutions and four civil society organizations (CSOs) as equal partners, and was innovative in the extent of decision-making power granted to the CSO partners within the research consortium. As the initial data analysis generated a very long list of values that the CSOs regarded as important for their work, prioritization was carried out on the basis of coding frequency to generate a list of five values with their associated proto-indicators: integrity, trustworthiness, unity in diversity, empowerment and justice. A total of 177 draft proto-indicators were intersubjectively chosen by representatives from all source CSOs, from the much larger number extracted from the data set for these six values [83]
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