ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the evolution of the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) to the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) and how that reflected a change in emphasis from sustainability to performance. The EPI would seem to have much more in common with the Human Development Index, a headline index presented as a league table designed to provoke improvement. The ESI was developed in the late 1990s and first published as a pilot study in 2000. An indicator may comprise more than one variable and the themes also differ in terms of the number of indicators that comprise them. The shift from the ESI to the EPI, with a reduction in number of indicators and a shift away from variables that were in the ‘Social and institutional capacity’ component in particular, would seem to have removed many of the components that were directly related to national wealth.
