Sustainability assessment for Chinese cities: Applicability, effectiveness and implementation scheme

In less than two decades since the notion of sustainable development has become firmly established in policy and academic domains, the debate within the field of sustainable development has shifted from the issue of definition to one of measurement. From the national to local levels, considerable efforts have been embarked in China to develop appropriate sustainability assessment measures (SAMs). The studies of SAM at the municipal level in China are particularly booming due to the diversity of Chinese cities both in terms of size and function. In spite of the value in generating creative thinking, the overlapping and redundancy in efforts of devising SAMs, partly because of the inapplicability of the devised SAMs, have undermined the usefulness of SAMs to guide policy-making and foster behavioral changes toward sustainable development. Many Chinese academic researchers and professionals have indicated these problems but primarily focused on methodological and technical aspects. This research attempts to address the radical issues embedded in the whole scheme of sustainability assessment with the objective of improving the applicability and effectiveness of SAMs for Chinese cities. Based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative investigations, this research identifies the major problems facing with the development and application of SAM for Chinese cities and the influential factors and proposes an implementation scheme for better appraisal of sustainability of Chinese cities.; The study has revealed a number of key findings. First, the evolvement of the SAMs for Chinese cities, typically characterized by increasing complexity and number of participants, was closely related to the evolvement of people's understanding of, and aspiration for, sustainable development. Second, of the problems identified by the sustainability assessment practitioners, the most crucial ones for SAM development and application respectively, are the unavailability of required data and incomprehensiveness of sustainable development dimensions. Third, the key factors that influence the applicability and effectiveness of SAMs for Chinese cities include difference between SAM developers and users in their understanding of the objectives and criteria of sustainability assessment; the context of the city subject to assessment, the process of decision-making in Chinese municipal governments and various methodological issues, etc.; With the above findings, this research concludes that sustainability assessment is an issue-driven, context-specified and decision-making-tailored task which demands the collaborative efforts of government users, data providers and SAM developers. The implementation scheme of sustainability assessment should preferably go through five phases: preparation for sustainability assessment, establishment of SAM, calculation of SAM results, application of SAM results and lastly the evaluation and improvement of SAM. Of the above, the first, the fourth and the last phases are of particular significances for Chinese cities. The research also highlights issues related to the evaluation of the applicability and effectiveness of SAM through an analysis of the ecological footprint and human development index of five cities in China including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Taiyuan and Guilin. The perspectives and insights derived from these case studies have shed some light on the future development and application of similar SAMs for other Chinese cities.