URBP7005 Chap.3 Indicator Frameworks and How to Choose Between Them
Indicator Frameworks and How to Choose Between Them
Six families, and what each one costs
Surveying how reports are actually built, across environmental reporting, quality of life work, healthy city work and urban sustainability work, yields six general framework families: domain based, goal based, sectoral, issue based, causal and combination. A domain arrangement guarantees coverage of the dimensions but severs each indicator from the goal it reports against.
A goal arrangement restores that link and covers only what the goals cover. A sectoral arrangement makes accountability obvious and shows linkages badly. An issue arrangement is readable and easy to build and tends to be assembled without matching indicators to goals.
A causal arrangement asserts a direction of causation and therefore owes evidence for it.
Two published sets, read as shapes
The domain example is a city report card listing twenty indicators under four headings and marking each as moving towards, moving away, or neither. The reading notes that most indicators filed under one heading could have been filed under another, which is the standing weakness of the form.
The goal example is a national local government model built on carrying capacity and quality of life, broken into themes, subthemes and then indicators.
That hierarchy is the cheapest defence against two complaints, because it shows why each indicator is in the set and makes a gap visible as an empty subtheme.
The causal family and what it demands
The condition, stress and response framework says that what people do puts pressure on environmental conditions, that those conditions then bear on economic, health and social conditions, and that policy answers either by easing the pressure or by working on the condition itself.
It exists to answer four questions in order: what the environment is doing, what is driving that, why it matters, and what is being done in response. Asserting the chain commits the report to evidence for it, which converts a reporting exercise into an argument.
Criteria, and what happens when they conflict
Eleven criteria recur.
A good indicator stands up scientifically, speaks for a wide span of conditions, moves when the thing it measures moves, matters to the people who will use it, rests on data that is accurate, obtainable and available far enough back to show a trend, can be understood by those users, can be set beside the same measure elsewhere, is cheap enough to keep collecting, will be picked up by the media, and is not open to two readings.
They conflict, most often between scientific validity and understandability, and the reading does not resolve the conflict. It says the relative importance has to be decided, and that because value judgements are involved the decision is best taken through a consensual multi stakeholder process.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Six framework families and the liability attached to each
- 02
Why the choice is not a matter of taste
- 03
A domain report card and its misfiled category
- 04
A goal hierarchy of themes, subthemes and indicators
- 05
The condition, stress and response chain and its four questions
- 06
The boundary between a framework question and a criteria question
- 07
Eleven selection criteria and the conflict between validity and readability
- 08
One pass, sequential and hybrid sequential evaluation
- 09
The evaluation matrix as the real deliverable
Defend a framework choice and name what it costs
- 3Name the weakness of the proposed arrangement for this city.
- 3Propose an alternative and tie it to something the city has already done.
- 3State what the alternative gives up and how to cover it.
Key terms
- Domain Based Framework
- An arrangement that starts from the dimensions of sustainability and finds indicators for each, guaranteeing coverage but leaving no direct link between an indicator and a goal.
- Goal Based Framework
- An arrangement that starts from the sustainability goals a community has adopted and then builds one or more indicators against each goal, or against a combination of them.
- Sectoral Framework
- An arrangement by area of government responsibility, which makes accountability easy to determine and shows linkages across areas poorly.
- Causal Framework
- An arrangement that introduces cause and effect, treating human activities as stressors on environmental conditions and policy as a response to either.
- Combination Framework
- An arrangement using two or more of the other families together, which is what an evaluation matrix checking goals, criteria and balance at once requires.
- Evaluation Matrix
- The table used to organise indicator selection, with rows for sustainability domains and column blocks for goal fit, general criteria and the balance of conditions, stressors and responses.
- Hybrid Sequential Procedure
- An evaluation that applies criteria in stages and also allows new candidate indicators to enter at a later phase when the screen exposes an uncovered goal.
- Selection Criteria
- The general tests of an indicator's viability and validity, which have nothing to do with its sustainability properties and are the step most often skipped.
Indicator Frameworks and How to Choose Between Them FAQ
How do I choose between the indicator frameworks?
Start from what the city has already committed to. Where adopted goals exist, a goal based arrangement ties every number to a promise and makes gaps visible through empty subthemes. Where they do not, a domain arrangement guarantees that all three dimensions appear. Where the report is meant to fix responsibility, a sectoral arrangement does that and needs an explicit linkage section to compensate.
In every case, write down the weakness you are accepting and what you have done about it, because that sentence is where the methodological credit sits.
Is it acceptable to combine two frameworks?
Yes, and the reading treats combination as one of the six families rather than as a compromise. The evaluation matrix it recommends is itself designed for a domain, goal and causal combination, with rows covering the domains, one block of columns testing goal fit, a middle block carrying the general criteria and a last block checking the balance of conditions, stressors and responses.
The cost is that there is more structure to maintain and more places to be inconsistent.
Why are selection criteria treated separately from the framework?
Because they answer a different question. A framework decides what the indicators are organised by; criteria decide whether an individual indicator is any good, and the reading is explicit that this says nothing about the indicator's sustainability properties and everything about whether it is viable and valid at all.
Rejecting an indicator because it does not fit the framework, when the real objection is that the data does not exist, is the mistake this distinction prevents.
Assessment move
Take the four goals of any city you know and try to build two indicator sets for it, one domain based and one goal based, with five indicators each. The exercise takes half an hour and it teaches the trade directly: you will find that the domain set is easier to complete and harder to justify, and that the goal set is the reverse. Then write the two sentences you would use to defend whichever one you would submit.
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