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S I G N I N G P R O G R E S S : I N D I C A T O R S M A R K T H E W A Y / 3 7Indicators and SustainableDevelopmentIntegrated Water Resources Management (IWRM)Indicators for monitoring progress towards sustainabledevelopment are needed in order to assist decision-makersand policy-makers at all levels and to increase focus onsustainable development (UN Sustainable Developmentweb site). 1The sustainable development, management, protection and use offreshwater resources act as guiding principles for indicatordevelopment and assessments. Sustainable development in particularhas received much attention since its position at the forefront of theWorld Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in 1987.The WCED defined sustainable development as ‘the development thatmeets the needs of the present without compromising the ability offuture generations to meet their own needs’. A key factor in theelaboration of sustainable development is the integral view taken ofthe central concepts: that the interests of people, society, economyand environment need to be seen as an interconnected whole andtrade-offs respecting all interests need to be made. Economicdevelopment has to be viable from a social and environmental point ofview, social development has to be viable in the light of economy, andenvironment and environmental policies have to be attuned to socialand economic development. The trade-offs are ultimately a societaland political choice.Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) can beregarded as the vehicle that makes the general concept ofsustainable development operational for the management offreshwater resources. IWRM adopts a holistic approach, whichimplies that information is needed on the state of the economy,society and water resources, and their mutual relationships. It alsoinvokes the need for greater participation, which means that theremust be tools for effective communication between different groupsof stakeholders – e.g. policy-makers, the public and scientists.Indicators can help simplify information on IWRM and establisheffective communication between various stakeholders.1. Citation taken from http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/isd.htm posted circa 2000.Indicator development modelsThe search for indicators is evolutionary. The mostimportant process is one of learning (WHO, 1999).Two main issues stand out as the main drivers for indicatordevelopment: the need to present complex phenomena inmeaningful, understandable, comparable and objective numbers todecision-makers and the public, and the need to establish objectivebenchmarks to analyse changes over time and space. Althoughtracking weather, rainfall and other hydrological variables has beencarried out for a long time, focused indicator development workappears to have begun only in the early 1980s, when the needarose for combining different variables to produce an aggregatevalue (Spreng and Wils, 2000). The effort gained additional impetusduring the late 1980s, when sustainable development became aglobal issue. This necessitated the development of indices, conceptsand frameworks that enabled putting these indicators and indicesinto cause-effect relationships, thereby integrating theenvironmental, economic and social domains of development.Considerable progress seems to have been made since the early1990s. Figure 3.5 summarizes the history of indicator development.In the literature, different approaches exist on how an indicatoror a set of indicators can be built (Bossel, 1999; Meadows, 1998;Van Harten et al., 1995). The major indicator development modelsappear to have been shaped by four approaches, namely thebottom-up approach where the logic goes from data to parametersto indicators, the top-down approach, which follows the logic downfrom vision to themes to actions to indicators, the systems approach,which bases indicators on a comprehensive analysis of system inflowsand outputs, and the cause-effect approach (commonly known asthe Pressure-State-Response [PSR] approach or the Driving force-Pressure–State-Impact-Resource [DPSIR] or the Driving Force-Pressure-State-Exposure-Effect-Action [DPSEEA]), which subscribes tothe logic of indicators denoting various causes and effects.1. The bottom-up approach uses an information pyramid,wherein the logic is to aggregate available primary data alongseveral hierarchical levels into indicators using intuitive andmathematical approaches. Water resource specialists tend to becritical of this approach as being too reductionist. It is reasonedthat the lumping of information not only reduces the ‘internalvariability’ of the system, but also loses the relational issues toother resources and processes. Finding data alone withoutbuilding models to test hypotheses in a real environment is oflittle use. Once data are available, very often in abundance, thereis some danger that the bottom-up approach has to go through abureaucratic compression process. With such compression,