Sustainability indicators and Agenda 21: experience from the Island of Guernsey (English version)

This paper uses the case of developing sustainability indicators on the Island of Guernsey over the last four years to show that Agenda Local 21’s call to activate grass roots action is being realised, but in ways that are neither top-down and modernist in approach, or bottom-up and post-modern as Agenda Local 21 advocates. Whilst best practice literature often suggests that community involvement must be engaged prior to designing sustainability indicators this paper explores the reasons why this is not always possible. Guernsey’s case is used to show how it only became possible to generate interest in the indicator process once they were actually up and running. However it also shows that once interest was secured by a few relevant stakeholders it became possible to further evolve the indicators in a process that has slowly been attracting more and more of the Island’s community.