ABSTRACT

In people various writings during the first decade of the twenty-first century on sustainability indicators, people goal was to take a systemic approach to understanding sustainability measurement. One of the features of SIs that struck us in the late 1990s was that they reflected a mindset based upon assumptions that suggested a mechanistic and reductive vision of the world. Drawing from Plato's Republic, Chambers powerfully sets out problems with mindsets: Unwitting prisoners, professionals sit chained to their central places and mistake the flat shows of figures, tables, reports, professional papers and printouts for the rounded, dynamic, multidimensional substance of the world of those others at the peripheries. Plato's reality, of which the prisoners received only the shadows, was of essences, each simple, unitary, abstract and unchanging. The reality, of which core professionals perceive only the simplified shadows, is in contrast a diversity: of people, of farming systems and livelihoods, each a complex whole, concrete and changing.