Making decisions about sustainability: joining social values with technical expertise

The term sustainable development is widely used but sustainability is an hardly agreed-upon concept. Generally, it means that due to environmental limitations society needs to consider the fate of future generations explicitly when making decisions. Governments, corporations, and individuals have called for vigorous action to attain sustainability, yet methods for practical implementation are still not at hand. This paper provider a brief introduction to sustainable development and, in particular, to a leading technique for specifying the concept, namely sustainability indicators. It next discusses why sustainability is both important and a challenge to public decision-making. The importance of technical expertise is highlighted and a potentially useful methodology is proposed-the application of a formal multi-attribute decision process to extend existing research on sustainability indicators into a publicly-accessible decision-making context which can be improved by technical expertise. Results from empirical research on this technique in an energy policy application are reported