In what way is it sustainable? : Developing a multi-criteria method for sustainability assessment of socio-technical systems

Abstract: Due to increasing environmental degradation, decreasing resource stocks, and growing inequality there is an urgent need for sustainable development. Many of these societal challenges are interlinked and interconnected and sustainable development represents a multi-dimensional and integrative concept to overcome them. To achieve sustainable development, system changes and the implementation of new technologies will be necessary— technologies that contribute toward solving several sustainability challenges in an integrated manner. The identification and implementation of more sustainable sociotechnical systems will require assessment methods that can encompass the meaning of sustainable development. Sustainable development is a dynamic and relative concept where what constitutes sustainability changes depending on the temporal, cultural, and technical context in which the system is introduced and on the reference used for comparison. Because of this, it is impossible to define specific technologies as universally sustainable; instead, each technology must be assessed concerning how the socio-technical systems that encompasses the technology contributes toward overcoming sustainability challenges in the context in which it is implemented. This assessment requires a method capable of encompassing the complexity, context-dependency, and value pluralism of sustainable development. In addition, the assessment method should contribute to the implementation of the most sustainable alternative to accelerate the societal transformation to sustainable development. Based on this, the thesis aimed to develop a method for sustainability assessment that could encompass the complexity, context-dependency, and value pluralism of sustainable development and which includes features that explicitly aim to facilitate the implementation of the most sustainable alternative(s). The method developed in the thesis is based on participatory multicriteria assessment. It differs from other participatory multi-criteria assessments in several ways because of its theoretical basis in soft system thinking and value pluralism. These theories have several implications for the assessment method. Some examples include: that quantitative relations between sustainability challenges in different moral value domains cannot be constructed, that there is no rigorous or dependable way to find the most sustainable alternative, and that multiple alternatives can be viewed as the most sustainable alternative because this is dependent on the values and norms of the decisionmakers. The sustainability assessment method developed in the thesis is a sixstep iterative method. The method is flexible and need not be strictly adhered to; instead, it should be adapted to the decision context it is used within. It provides decision-makers with a systematic overview of knowledge on how different relevant alternatives contribute to, or counteract, overcoming various sustainability challenges. This enables informed and rational decision-making concerning what alternatives are perceived as the most sustainable and, therefore, should be implemented. This implementation process is one that the assessment method contributes toward by, for example, including criteria for assessing feasibility in the assessment framework and recommending what type of actors to involve in the assessment process. The method builds on the idea that the purpose of sustainability assessments can never be to state if a system is sustainable or not; rather, the purpose is to state in what way a system is sustainable or not.