Social Perspectives of Sustainability

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National Center for Environmental Decision-making Research (NCEDR), are:

•Secondary/archival techniques

•Primary/field work techniques

•Gaps-and-blinders techniques.

These tools are developed within the social sciences over decades and provide many avenues for information gathering. In the case of sustainability assessment, often the traditional tools of social sciences need to integrate with contingent valuation, valuation of resources or factors that are not actually sold or bought in the market. The skill and aptitude used in contingent valuation helps in making rational decisions on the environment. Thus, the sustainability components of a forest policy as such are not a part of compact policy but are integrated with individual policy programs of society. Therefore, evaluating social perceptions of a particular policy is to evaluate its status and linkage within the arena of the society. This share usually depends on:

•Who has formulated the policy?

•What lasting social benefit or cost could the policy produce?

•Who will derive the benefits?

•What environmental problem may be created?

•What alternatives do exist?

Usually, there are power groups as well as pressure groups for environment and sustainability who influence the policy situation within the society. Power groups, in general (have power, may or may not be involved), and pressure groups (involved, but may or may not have power), in particular, of developing countries are usually from higher income levels. They sometimes use the environment as a tool for competing for political power. This is also similar in state-level activities; rich nations put pressure on poor nations to maintain environment, whereas poor nations want something else, such as economic development. However, the difficulties in describing the problems are seemingly an unending struggle for achieving social and economic power by contemporary groups and institutions, often without regard for longterm effects on the social and physical environments. Thus, sustainability consideration of a policy embraces social events that need to comprehend certain aspects of a number of social variables which Fairweather and Tornatzky (1977) called “social situational variables.”

Social situational variable can be an “internal” or an “external process.” Social situational variables are presented as a list in Table 9.1.

The internal situational variables shown in Table 9.1 are not independent of one another. There are common dimensions representing and associated with each variable. A variable, e.g., organization, may have different reinforcement systems and a different status of role relationship. It can define the differences between the internal processes of the policy and may have a relationship with some dimensions of enforcement under “group dynamics.”

However, among those there are variables that are relatively easily manipulatable (controllable) than the others. Some of the variables are presented as examples and classified according to their relative manipulation characteristics in Table 9.2. When a policy measure is implemented, usually it should look into the manipulatable variables to achieve the nonmanipulatable variables. On the contrary, if a policy measure tries to achieve improvement in the variables shown under a nonmanipulatable category without considering the manipulatable category, it may become unsuccessful. However, when different variables are considered for evaluation, the questions about scale of measurement need to be resolved. After Anderson (1971), four types of scale may be considered:

1.Nominal—just naming the group or groups into one category and in this case no quantitative relationship can be made.

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Table 9.2 Manipulatable and Nonmanipulatable Internal Social Process Variables

2.Ordinal—specify a quantitative explanation among different categories or points of the scale but are limited to scale of equivalence and inequality thus of three values only: “equal,” “greater than,” and “less than,” with no statement regarding the distance between two unequal values.

3.Interval—the scale is formed when the distances between any two points can be known for all the values in the scale (e.g., temperature).

4.Ratio scale—is one which has a characteristics of interval values as well as having absolute zero values (e.g., velocity and mass).

As the social processes are real-life phenomena, they can be measured with nominal or ordinal scales that can be designed and created on a rational basis. But in some cases, demographic variables can be scaled with ratio or interval scales. Therefore, it is important to categorize the social information. Usually, variables considered for comparison require checking the validity. According to Fairweather and Tornatzky (1977), there can be two types of validity for social information:

1.Outcome validity

2.Concept validity.