ABSTRACT
Sustainability assessment is now thoroughly on the agenda. This deepening attention to issues of sustainability and sustainable development goes back to the release of the Club of Rome Limits to Growth report in 1972. In recent years, this attention has translated into the increasingly widespread organizational practice of sustainability assessment. The concept of sustainability assessment is used in this chapter to cover the manifold activities of monitoring, evaluating, reporting and providing an evidence base for policy development in relation to sustainability problems and outcomes. We start by briefly surveying existing work in the development of sustainability assessment approaches. As we have elaborated earlier, this gives us four categories of social sustainability: ecology, economics, politics and culture. Building on these considerations, we present one possible approach for building a sustainability reporting framework. In our characterization of sustainability assessment, we distinguish broadly between the process and the administration of the framework.
