ABSTRACT
This chapter explores one set of ways of opening up and broadening out analysis and action. It focuses on a potential array of methods and tools that can be used in the appraisal of sustainability issues. The chapter outlines key ingredients of effective appraisal to help define pathways to sustainability. A wide diversity of tools, methods, techniques, frameworks, approaches and processes exist under the label ‘appraisal’. Despite increasing interest in addressing wider social issues and perspectives in sustainability assessment, the dominant influence on appraisal remains with conventional expert-analytic methods. In a similar way, appraisal conducted through certain types of decision analysis or participant observation both represent very different forms of expert-analytic approach that have the effect of broadening out the inputs to appraisal. Appraisal processes need to move beyond static ‘snapshot’ approaches to the assessment of benefits and impacts, to adopt a dynamic perspective.
