Sustainability Assessment

Sustainability Assessment (SA) can be defined as “a structured process, dealing with a sustainability issue, using knowledge from various scientific disciplines and/or stakeholders, such that integrated insights are made available to decision makers.” How the SA process can best be structured depends on the nature of the problem addressed. Sustainability issues are routinely referred to as complex, wicked, unstructured problems, often without further specification. A closer look at the typologies of wicked and unstructured problems makes it clear that problem structuring is an essential first step in dealing with complex sustainability issues. Important dimensions to address in problem structuring are knowledge uncertainties and normative disagreements concerning the problem and its possible solutions. A participatory and iterative learning approach appears to be the most appropriate way to structure problems. It is from this perspective that we discuss SA approaches developed
at ICIS.