Accounting for sustainability: implementing a residential emissions reduction strategy

using an approach that combines qualitative and quantitative ‘indicators’ of sustainability

Dr Andy Scerri
RMIT University, Australia

Indicators-based projects are currently central to many urban sustainable development initiatives admin-
istered by local, city, and national governments, non-governmental organizations and increasingly, com-
mercial interests, such as corporations. However, the quantitative basis of many such projects means that
achieving urban sustainability objectives through them is often reduced to a technical task–that of gath-
ering data and ‘ticking boxes’. e size, scope, and sheer number of indicators included within many such
projects can also mean that indicator sets are often unwieldy. More importantly, unless administered in a
‘top-down’ fashion, indicators of sustainability can resist effective implementation. is paper begins from
the claim that the privileging of quantitative data in some stages of indicator-based projects tends to mask
possibilities for taking into account the structures of power and cultural-political assumptions within a
city. It is argued that emphasizing quantitative measures, such as indicator sets, without taking into ac-
count how they can both reflect and affect existing power and value structures weakens the commitment
to methodological holism that is central to the aim of achieving sustainability. In part, the techno-scientific
‘edge’ of indicators sets tends to privilege ‘value-free’ information over ‘value-laden’ knowledges. at is,
citizen participation and active involvement do not necessarily figure in selecting indicators of sustain-
ability, and local knowledges and inputs are sometimes overlooked. is is especially important in urban
contexts, insofar as the success of sustainability projects so often depends upon locally available resources
and conditions, and upon the use of these by citizens to support sustainable practices and to challenge
unsustainable practices. is paper elaborates an alternative, two-level process of community engage-
ment for indicators-centred sustainable urban development projects. At the first level, it involves citizens
as active participants in the task of developing qualitative rankings of indicators of sustainability across
four domains of social practice: economics, ecology, politics and culture. e approach asks participating
groups to reflect upon what kinds of things indicate whether or not a city is sustainable, who benefits and
who loses by acting to achieve sustainability, and what does it mean, in relation to prevailing values, to
negotiate the transition to sustainable practices around indicator sets. At the second level, it uses the un-
derstandings developed in the first level as a basis for more deeply involving people in learning about and
negotiating over what constitutes knowledge about how best to practice sustainable urban development.
Based the experience of recent projects aimed at reducing residential emissions in Melbourne, Australia
and Vancouver, Canada, the present paper discusses some of the practical issues that arise when setting
out to develop and implement qualitative indicators of sustainability that incorporate quantitative met-
rics, where the aim of such projects is to engage citizens in the job of achieving sustainability as a set of
practices, undertaken on terms acceptable to them in the context of the communities in which they live.

Keywords: assessment focus and flexibility, comparative urban sustainability, indicator development,
stakeholder participation, sustainability metrics and indicators
1 Introduction
Over recent decades, indicator-based projects have become central to a range of
community-development projects aimed at engendering 'sustainability'. Indeed, it
has been argued that "growth in the use of sustainability indicators is nothing short
of phenomenal" (Morel-Journel et al. 2003: 617; Rydin et al. 2003: 582). A
"sustainability indicators explosion" has been extended across the planet—and on
the back of processes of globalization—from neighbourhoods to international
policy-making and development initiatives, and from local 'social'
entrepreneurialism to multinational corporate 'social responsibility' initiatives.
Indeed, one of the most widely-used indicators frameworks, the Global Reporting
Initiative (GRI), sees "reducing report proliferation" as a major issue (2006).
Often primarily quantitative in approach, indicators-based projects are extremely
valuable tools for measuring where an urban area 'is' in relation to some or other
given concept of 'sustainability' or 'sustainable development'. However, much
urban sustainability work seems to draw a line around indicators and metrics, as if
this were enough. Indeed, a key finding of Levett-erivel's 2004 report to the
SUE-MoT consortium was that while "there are plenty of existing sustainability
metrics, models and toolkits", it remains the case that "there is no such thing as 'a
good tool' in the abstract". e report advises those developing sustainability tools
to be aware of the tool's "fitness for purpose". Moreover, the report suggests that,
of the "78-plus" tools that were examined, "few … come close to being
'sustainability' tools in terms of being inclusive, holistic, multi-dimensional and
capable of simultaneously addressing the social, environmental and economic core
issues together with other factors such as political, technical or legal constraints".
Indeed, "the concept of a 'true' sustainability tool may be impossible to achieve in
practice" (52-53; see also, Castillo et al. No Date: 39-40).
is said, the problem addressed by the present paper is that, in the context of
urban sustainable development projects, concentrating upon indicators in
themselves does not adequately bring into question the nature of the human
relationships that go into creating and reproducing a city on sustainable terms.
e main argument is that emphasizing quantitative measures, such as indicator
sets, without somehow undertaking the difficult task of accounting for how these
can both reflect and affect existing power and value structures weakens the
commitment to methodological holism that is central to the aim of achieving
sustainability. e suggestion developed here is that indicators-based projects—
most often measuring and assessing 'participation' or 'inclusion' in some or other
sustainability initiative, as signposts for 'sustainability'—can displace concerns
with understanding the city as a lived condition as well as a built environment.
at is, conceptually, the present paper addresses the interweaving of science with
society in indicators-centred urban sustainability projects.
In short, the paper looks at how the techno-scientific 'edge' of indicators sets can
tend to privilege 'value-free information' over 'value-laden knowledges', which
raises problems of an applied nature for the job of achieving sustainability. e
paper looks at the problem from a perspective grounded in urban planning and
community development studies, informed by critical social and political
theorizing. e normative argument is, therefore, one that recommends
approaching society in terms of sociality: the ongoing job of creating and
reproducing a social world that is 'the city'. Such a perspective partially
reconfigures the task of working to achieve sustainability: the job is re-centred to
focus upon a problematic or set of problematics that are inextricably linked to
questions of value and power. at is, the task of working to achieve urban
sustainability, in reference to some or other set of indicators or metrics is one that
needs to be understood in terms of pressing yet difficult to resolve problematics
that, nonetheless, need to be addressed (2008: 13).
is is to emphasize that the success or failure of indicators-centred urban
sustainability projects is, in important respects, dependent upon negotiated
outcomes relating to the selection and application of quantitative metrics. Such a
realization is especially important in urban contexts, insofar as the success of
projects so often depends upon locally available resources and conditions, and
upon the use of these by citizens to support sustainable practices and to challenge
unsustainable practices. In these respects, it is suggested that the development and
implementation of indicators-centred tools for putting into practice urban
sustainability principles is best achieved through the application of a "two-stage
tool or process" (Levett-erivel 2004: 54). Following a brief discussion that aims
to thresh-out some of the conceptual and theoretical issues raised above, the latter
part of the present paper elaborates a two-level process of citizen engagement for
indicators-centred sustainable urban development projects, and draws upon
recent experiences in Melbourne, Australia, and to a much more limited extent,
Vancouver, Canada. e paper concludes by discussing work on the projects to
date, and reflects upon some of the limitations of city-based approaches to the job
of achieving sustainability as a holistically conceived goal that the projects bring to
light.

2 e case for mixing methods

In the main, the key objective of urban sustainability projects is to develop and
implement practices that can ensure that cities are being (re-)created to "meet the
needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs" (World Commission on Environment and Development
1987: 43). More can be said about the meaning of the concept of ‘needs’ here, but
such discussion goes beyond the ambit of the present paper. Nevertheless, within
such a definition, indicators of 'sustainability' are in the first instance simply a
means for assessing the distance between a current state of affairs and the ongoing
task of achieving a sustainable way of life in the context of a given social setting. In
the second instance, they can also be much more: a means to the end of instituting
debate and agreement over how best to practice the job of being sustainable.
To return briefly to the delineation made earlier between 'value-free' information
and 'value-laden' knowledges, the point may be merely that indicators-centred
projects move too readily from quantitative data sets—taken up from areas as
diverse as climatology, the health sciences or econometrics—to making qualitative
claims about human experiences, such as well-being, quality of life, the enjoyment
of 'natural' light, 'quiet' space or leisure opportunities. is order of argument
becomes important when considering suggestions, such as those made by
sociologist Gerard Delanty that "Science is increasingly becoming a
communicative system that interacts reflexively with society" (2002: 83). Delanty's
point may sound like a high-flown way of saying that scientific research, whether
'natural' or 'social', is now almost universally understood as a practice conducted in
'partnerships' with industry, government and civil institutions, philanthropic
trusts, and even lottery funds, all of which have needs, desires and ends in mind
that can inform and affect research, and the kinds of research that is done. And,
moreover, that scientific facts enter the public life-world often and readily:
examples are not limited to climate change, and extend to the 'hospital bug scare'
and of course, dietary issues that have many pondering 'protein or carbohydrates'
before meals. us, Delanty's understanding of scientific knowledge, which
encapsulates either its 'natural' or 'social' modalities, is valuable.
As the threats posed by climate change to the sustainability of human society
become increasingly urgent, 'natural' scientific information about the environment
becomes increasingly relevant to ‘social’ scientific concerns with sustainability.
Indeed, as philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre recognized several decades ago, the
products of 'natural' science are 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 (1977). Indeed, all kinds of
'natural' scientific understandings are increasingly becoming politicized: 'the facts'
are increasingly subjected to external (that is, 'non-scientific') evaluation and
critique. At the same time, science as a whole is being de-mystified, insofar as the
presence of what Andrew Dobson, Robin Eckersley and others have labelled "the
ecological challenge" (2006) normalizes the place of relatively abstract information
and the knowledges associated with these within social life. Indeed, at least since
the Rio Summit and Brundltand reports, the knowledges created by the 'social'
sciences have been increasingly called upon by policy-makers as a means to the
ends of preparing societies for climate change, and of developing sustainable ways
of living. In this view, 'social' scientific knowledges constitute an aspect of what
Peter Wagner sees as "part of the discursive self-understanding of social life". at
is to say, the 'social' sciences have come to occupy an "interpretive space" in
society. Over the same period, 'natural' scientific information has become a
common feature in everyday life, communicated into the 'living room' by the
news-media. What is important about such views is that, while representing
scientific endeavour as part and parcel of social life, it also helps to break down the
"legitimacy deficit" between 'natural' and 'social science' forms of knowledge (2001:
36, 38).
Seeing things in these terms, however, does raise a pressing issue in relation to
indicators-centred urban sustainability initiatives: 'natural' and 'social' science
methods are fundamentally different. An important point is that, as Bent Flyvbjerg
argues, 'natural' science deals with explanation and predictability. It provides
information about the world, which is something that 'social' science is
exceedingly bad at (2001: 3). ink about the failure of most political and
sociological observers to predict the fall of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 or more
recently, the failure of most mainstream economists to predict or explain the
current malaise of the markets. e point is that 'social' science deals reflexively
and sometimes critically with power and values and so, concentrates upon "the
interests and institutions that sustain them in the social world". Flyvbjerg argues
that 'social' scientific knowledge "is important because it is that activity by which
instrumental-rationality is balanced by value-rationality and because such
balancing is crucial to the sustained happiness of the citizens in any society" (2001:
4, Italics added). In calling for 'social' scientific research to be (self-)understood as
the activity of constituting, sustaining and elaborating value-rationality, Flyvbjerg
argues for understanding social research as a self-reflexive exercise that may best
be defined in terms of developing, debating and propagating value-consciousness.
us, Flyvbjerg argues that the "goal [of 'social' scientific understanding] is one of
contributing to society’s capacity for value-rational deliberation and action" (2001:
167).
erefore, in the argument developed here, 'information' can be said to refer to
'objective' data-type material, whether derived or developed using quantitative or
qualitative means. Alternately, 'knowledge' is said to refer to necessarily value-
laden claims about information and its uses in a social context. Based in this
delineation, the approach discussed here aims at recognizing the value of
qualitative approaches while adopting a fundamentally different approach to
quantitative indicators-centred projects. It needs to be stressed that the point is
not to suggest that 'natural' scientific understandings of the physical universe are
unimportant. Indeed, such 'natural' scientific information—about resources or
processes within ecosystems, for example—is essential to recognizing the sources
and effects of un-sustainability. Rather, the suggestion is that 'natural' sciences
need to be defended, indeed championed, in the context of conditions that are also
loaded with largely unpredictable social—ecological, economic, cultural and
political—possibilities.
e approach advocated here views 'natural' scientific data as one contribution to
the creation of knowledges that can support practices aimed at achieving
sustainability. On the other side of raw information are the fields of power and
values that give shape and form to knowledge, and qualify its uses. Seeing things in
this way involves a rethinking of what indicators actually are. In effect, the
suggestion is that many of the things that are understood as 'indicators' in
quantitative terms need to be taken as sub-indicators or metrics, and embedded
within a more comprehensive qualitative framework. In other words, quantitative
metrics need to be understood in terms of qualitative judgements. is, it is
argued, raises possibilities for developing qualitative rankings of sustainability-in-
practice. ese can work to de-mystify 'natural' science by facilitating reflections
upon and learning about how prevailing forms of authority and criteria for value
can and do impact upon a community’s capacity to practice sustainable
development.
In this approach, quantitative indicators, as well as the 'natural' scientific
worldviews that accompany them, become discrete elements of sustainable
development in practice. Sustainability indicators are thus treated as merely
representing an aspect of lived reality. In the approach described here, it is the
practical activity by which citizens learn about and select indicators that is seen as
having the badly needed potential to change the relationships between people, and
between Humanity and Nature, thereby changing people and changing nature
(Gare 2008: 6). What is suggested in the present paper is that technical problems
need to take the passenger's seat and assume the role of navigator, orienting people
in the task of negotiating the form and content of the relations in and through
which people create and reproduce a society, or discrete parts of it, such a city or
urban community. From here, it might be argued that many of the problems
associated with working to achieve sustainability need to be partially re-conceived
on procedural and deliberative terms: that is to say, living in a city needs to be
better understood as a learning condition (Delanty 2003: 558. Other accounts of
the centrality to the task of achieving sustainability of learning and negotiating
about its 'practices' are developed around concepts of "ecological" or
"environmental citizenship". For a comprehensive discussion of such concepts, see
Andrew Dobson and Derek Bell (2006)). Quantitative indicators and a qualitative
rationale for applying them need to be combined in a procedure that is designed to
assist in the practical human task of working to achieve sustainability.

3 Accounting for sustainability

From the perspective of these suggestions, the approach set out here runs
complementary to the orientation of the SUE-MoT Integrated Sustainability
Assessment Tool, aimed at achieving Whole Life Urban Sustainability in relation
to urban development, planning, zoning and infrastructure, for example. As such,
it is important briefly to draw attention to one more aspect of the approach, before
discussing it in detail through a worked example. One of the outcomes of both an
increasing interest in sustainability and an assumed dominance 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’ (TBL) model. In general, these
approaches aim to measure impacts upon the economic, social, and environmental
‘bottom lines’ of a city. In general, (and there are numerous exceptions) the city is
treated as a discrete functional unit, much like a business firm, with inputs and
outputs, 'internalities' and 'externalities'.
Of course, the three-dimensional approaches are problematic for many, simply
because they unquestioningly set the rules, norms and values—the 'ideologies'—
associated with the (capitalistic-market) economy in pride of place when
evaluating sustainability. is said, and however one feels about such criticism, it
does help to clarify an important issue: the TBL approaches often assume a strong
commensurability of values between the different domains of human social
practice (Martinez-Alier 2002). ese TBL approaches, such as the widely used
GRI, tend to presume that economic, social and environmental sustainability are
either commensurable a priori of other considerations, or that the economic
domain (which in conditions of globalization 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.
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. is decision is not designed to relegate the social to
a background feature of human practice but rather, is a deliberate decision to put
sociality at the centre of the challenge of achieving sustainability. is means
treating the economy as one domain or 'sphere' of social life, rather than as
something separated from the social. e 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.
e approach also means treating the ecological as a social question, rather than
an 'objective' issue manifest in an external Natural environment. (In terms of the
theoretical matters that this suggestion raises, grappling 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, Eve
Chiapello and Laurent évenot (2006 [1991]; 2005 [1999])).
A working definition of each domain follows:
• e Economic Domain is defined in terms of activities associated with the
production, exchange, consumption, organization and distribution of goods
and services.
• e Ecological Domain is defined as the intersection between the social and
the 'environmental', and focuses upon human engagement with and within the
non-human world of things (Despite the fact that the natural environment is a
material reality that extends beyond the human experience of it, and despite
the increasing capacity of techno-science to reconstitute elements of nature,
the ecological domain is, at once, social and natural).
• e Political Domain is defined in terms of what goes into the job of
organizing, over time and in a particular space, the rules for a life held-in-
common.
• e Cultural Domain is defined in terms of practices, discourses and material
objects that express commonalities and differences, continuities and
discontinuities of meaning over time.
e approach therefore recognizes a tension between (generative) values across
different domains of practice, between human ‘needs’ and ecological ‘limits’ or
between socially beneficial 'inclusion' and socially beneficial 'exclusion', for
example, which need to be answered in each of the four domains of practice.
Meanwhile, it aims to develop an understanding of the need for comparability
across (particular) domains: that is, across the different ways in which such an
order of social tensions are negotiated. Hence, this not to suggest that the four
domains are in practice divided spheres of activity. Rather, the point is that it is
analytically 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' this, if a city is to work towards
achieving sustainability.

3.1 e approach in practice: Level One

e approach is therefore aimed at providing a means by which a city and its
citizens can both account for sustainability in quantitative terms, and account for
sustainability in terms of agreeing upon what this requires, in relation to changes
to or reinforcement of established rules, norms and values. e present paper now
turns to focus upon a specific worked example; a case study of the two-level
approach in practice. e approach is currently being piloted in Melbourne,
Australia and Vancouver, Canada: it is a work in progress. In order to present
things in a clear and concise way, the present paper concentrates upon findings
from the Melbourne project, which at the time of writing has advanced further
than the project in Vancouver. e point of contact in Melbourne was the
Sustainability Team of a progressive city council, which engaged the researchers in
order to develop an indicators-set through the Accounting for Sustainability
approach for the resident-focussed portion of the city's umbrella Strategy to
reduce waste and emissions. e residential portion of the Melbourne Strategy
focuses upon minimizing household water and electricity usage and waste (trash)
reduction. e point of contact in Vancouver has been a university department
and, though academics there, the local regional authority. A considerable amount
of preparatory work has been carried out in Vancouver, with the approach being
evaluated in relation to existing urban indicators projects. Researchers in
Vancouver have focussed upon the dimension within the approach that
emphasises fostering value-based thinking on sustainability issues. At the time of
writing, decisions in relation to a specific project on which to apply the approach
are pending.
Initially, one representative of the Sustainability Team in Melbourne was asked to
consider Council's undertaking of the Strategy in terms of four questions:
1. What is the depth of awareness of the issue (reducing household water and
electricity usage and waste reduction) in relation to each (economics/ecology/
politics/culture) domain?
2. How adequate have been the practical responses to this issue in relation to
each (economics/ecology/politics/culture) domain?
3. How appropriate have been the resources brought to bear on this issue in
relation to each (economics/ecology/politics/culture) domain?
4. How well have responses to this issue been monitored across each (economics/
ecology/politics/culture) domain?
Hence, Level One involves taking steps to begin to rethink the practices and
procedures that can make or break sustainable development objectives, and begins
with something of a sustainability ‘self-assessment’ task. is is designed to get the
process moving by fostering the production of a record-like 'social map', in relation
to which possible indicators to be applied within each of the four domains of
practice are selected. e researchers ranked responses to each of the four
questions in relation to each domain 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 public
opinion polls; minutes of meetings and records of community meetings, town
planning sessions and council meetings. is took place in conjunction with a
series of ‘strategic’ interviews, designed to establish some of the ‘subjective’
understandings and expectations of the Strategy held within Council and by the
Sustainability Team itself.
A key finding of this early stage of the project has been that there exists something
of a misfit between the city's self-understanding of sustainability as a holistic issue
(the Strategy understands the 'city as an ecosystem') and the domains of human
social practice in which it has moved to achieve 'sustainability'. In short, great
emphases were placed upon understandings of 'environmental impact' and
economic issues relating to opportunities for increased efficiency, and less on
cultural issues. Council was largely unprepared for the emergence of political
issues in relation to the strategy, and seemed to understand cultural issues purely
in terms of 'community engagement' through its website.
Simultaneously, the researchers undertook to organize and convene a Critical
Reference Group (CRG) for the projects. Conscious of the (almost intractable)
problem of merely replicating existing social structures, such as hierarchies and
vested interests, the group was 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. e 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 achieve sustainability. is strategic
part of the project served as a guide and overview of city objectives and hopes for
the project, and specifically aimed to identify key participants and those affected
by the eventual implementation of the indicators sets.
In summary, this initial stage built-up a profile of the city in relation to the stated
objectives of its Strategy, and aimed to situate the city and its strategy as part of
'society' broadly conceived. 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 existing
community events, and a questionnaire was to be distributed to householders in
the weeks preceding Earth Hour in April 2009. e 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.

3.2 e Approach in Practice: Level Two

e step from Level One to Two of the approach actively establishes the basis for
public participation in the indicators-centred development project. e aim of
level Two is to move beyond "feel-good talk of 'participation'" (Cornwall 2008:
270-271), and to 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: 179).
Participation in Level Two is, therefore, designed to take the form of contesting,
negotiating, and self-defining what it is that 'sustainability' will encompass and
entail, and what are the particular limitations of this project in relation to this
'global' goal. us, Level two involves a double process of negotiation; the aim of
going beyond 'traditional' indicators is to prompt negotiating over what constitutes
knowledge about how best to practice city life and to develop and implement
'indicators' that involve people in learning about and 'doing' sustainability. e 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:
5. Who benefits and who loses in the current situation, and how might this be
changed?
6. What does it mean, in relation to current norms, to negotiate these matters?
e key considerations in Level Two were asked of the Sustainability Team and the
CRG and will also be central to the community questionnaire preceding Earth
Hour. Level Two is designed to elicit reflection upon how some of the most
important over-arching issues that inform city life, in the context of wider societal
conditions, might contribute to or detract from the goal of achieving sustainable
development 'outcomes'. At this point, "invited participation" (Cornwall, 2000) is
reversed in the form of an external agency being invited in—from the perspective
of householders—to broker the parameters of the project.
Level Two of the project to date has generated much enthusiasm from Council
itself, the Sustainability Team and the CRG. Some members of the CRG also began
to take on a role of 'householder-citizen advocate', and the group began to
understand the project itself as a means for making louder city residents' views on
the sustainability of many urban issues. As a way of taking this second level of the
project further, the researchers injected into the discussion a number of dialogical
'social themes', with the aim of using these as a framework for negotiating the
boundaries within which indicators of sustainability need to be established. ese
are presented in the form of pairs of related concepts, with each drawing attention
to major, fundamental, and historically debated sources of social tension (At the
theoretical level, this move by the researchers raises epistemological-normative
questions about the 'need for foundations', and the strength or weakness of
foundational arguments in relation to providing positive 'answers' to social
problems).
4 Conclusion
Rather than summarizing the present paper, this conclusion provides some
reflections upon the current status of the Melbourne portion of the project. 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.
e researchers have called upon the Sustainability Team to reflect upon and
substantiate the ‘objective’ position of the city in relation to a tension between the
need for participation (in selecting and implementing practices around indicators
of residential emissions) and authority (that is, the scientific authority implicit in
quantitative indicators and the authority of council to under-gird the
implementation process, or even to establish the need for sustainability as a social
goal). e assumption here 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) for social practice, and this needs to be
negotiated dialogically if satisfactory responses to the problem of sustainability are
to be reached.
Hence, Level Two builds upon Level One's evaluation of the Strategy. e
Accounting for Sustainability approach is in this sense serving to frame
negotiations between Council, business, and the community—within the
particular constraints of 'the city'—in a 'soft' way, by linking 'natural' to 'social'
scientific endeavour and binding both together under the auspices of a recognized
foundational need to negotiate the terms upon which the task of achieving
sustainability is to be implemented. e questionnaire is currently being developed
mindful of the need to address the existence of the 'tensions' that arise between
desires for citizen participation (and possibilities for it) and authority (in the
establishing of indicators by council, as well as council expectations of state and
federal authority on the sustainability issue). In this sense, one unexpected
consequence of the project so far has been the way it has worked to set in relief—
for the researchers, Council and, it is suggested, city residents—both the
importance and the limitations of "local and subnational climate change" measures
(For a recent discussion of the political issues that such 'subnational' initiatives
raise, see Schreurs 2008). is is of course seen by the researchers and the CRG as
a matter that extends the issue beyond Council's 'patch', thus, signalling all the
more explicitly, the need for ways of addressing the task of achieving sustainability
in broader, holistic terms that encompass not only local but national and global
institutions.

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