Objectives and indicators in sustainable development strategies: similarities and variances across Europe

Reinhard Steurer, Markus Hametner

Publication: Scientific journalJournal articlepeer-review

Abstract

Europe has positioned itself as a progressive global player in environmental and sustainable development (SD) policies, and SD strategies should play a key role in better coordinating policies horizontally across sectors and vertically across levels of government. This paper gives an overview of the objectives and indicators employed in 24 national SD strategies across Europe, covering five different welfare state models. After highlighting some structural features of SD strategies the paper explores how coherently they address environmental and social policies, measured against the objectives and indicators of the EU SD strategy. It is shown that environmental objectives and indicators are more coherent than social ones. Re-garding the five socio-economic models it was found that the significant variance regarding social policy objectives and indicators is mainly due to the fact some SDSs from Mediterra-nean countries ignore this dimension of SD. The paper concludes that SD strategies in Europe (in particular the EU SD strategy) unfold only a fraction of their potential to better co-ordinate policies vertically across different levels of government. Since this conclusion is con-firmed by more qualitative research approaches, the European governance architecture for sustainable development is questioned in fundamental ways.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)224 - 241
JournalSustainable Development
Volume21
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2013

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