A NAIADE based approach for sustainability benchmarking

Sustainability management and planning is mainly a social decision process about the desired future of a given city, region or country. A possible reduction of the unavoidable complexity, present in this type of problems, consists in considering explicitly non-equivalent representations which arise in the interaction between the various observer subjects and the different systemic levels considered. The reduction of the number of non-equivalent representations leads us to the use of descriptors such as indicators and indexes. Then a question arises: how could such indicators be used for policy making? This paper presents a multicriteria framework, aimed at helping real-world policy processes, for the benchmarking of sustainability indicators. Copyright © 2006 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.