30 January 2025, TU Eindhoven
Description:
Monitoring life quality and environmental impact is fundamental to the international shared agenda of achieving sustainable development. The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s), represent a widely adopted framework to quantify sustainable development, divided into 17 goals, 169 targets and 247 indicators. However, other frameworks have also been developed—predating or in parallel to the growing popularity of the SDG’s—to address specific concerns such as the Well-being monitor based on the recommendations of European statisticians (CES) adopted by Netherlands Statistics (CBS), under a national mandate for the Dutch society, or the Wellbeing, Inclusion, Sustainability & the Economy (WISE) Database, a repository of global Beyond-GDP indexes and indicators.
Organized by the research project STONEM (Sustainability Trade-offs in the Netherlands’ Entangled Modernization, 1900-2020), this workshop aims to bring together researchers and experts working on quantitative approaches to well-being, sustainability, and inclusion. Frank Veraart (STONEM) will share first insights on the origins of imports of metals and plant-oils to the Netherlands in the last century. Annegeke Jansen will present her work for the WISE Horizons project. This includes a synthesis of Beyond GDP metrics and a global analysis of wellbeing developments from 1820 until now. Experts from the CBS working group Wellbeing and Sustainable Development Goals will share the current debates and ideas of enhancing the visibility of ´Elsewhere´ dimensions as part of the national frameworks of sustainability. It is an opportunity to share challenges and concerns but also preliminary results and interesting avenues for investigation. The workshop also aims to promote an exchange between national, international/global and historical perspectives.
Program:
13.00: Frank Veraart, Coordinator STONEM, Assistant Professor History of Technology TU/e
13.30: Annegeke Jansen, PhD candidate WISE Horizons/Beyond GDP at Leiden University
14.00: Edwin Horlings, Statistics Netherlands (CBS)
14.30: Coffee Break
14.45: Dulce van Vliet, Postdoc STONEM: STONEM Research Agenda
15.15: Roundtable discussion
16.30: End of Workshop
Summary/Report:
Frank Veraart opened the workshop by highlighting the need for an intergenerational and transnational approach to thinking and researching sustainability. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern life has been sustained by a growing entanglement of resource extraction, production, consumption and disposal between various regions of the world. With the increase of complexity in international supply (and disposal) chains, it is important to give visibility to these entangled systems not only by investigating the processes of commodification (how “things” are transformed into goods with a market value), but also what actors (system entanglers) are active in these sociotechnical systems and which power relations and knowledge politics are at stake. Veraart presented some of the first results of the STONEM project, namely historical overviews of the imports of metals and plant-oils to the Netherlands. The datasets showed not only shifts in countries of origin over time but also shifts in resources and interdependencies between countries. Veraart concluded his presentation by emphasizing the importance of investigating sustainability trade-offs and synergies by mapping social, economic and environmental developments of these entangled systems across multiple regions of the world.
The next speaker, Annegeke Jansen, introduced the research project WISE Horizons, which aims to create a database to compile the many existing Beyond-Growth initiatives, featuring indicators and models which focus on measuring sustainable and inclusive well-being. Jansen described how GDP (Gross Domestic Product), while seen as a proxy for well-being, does not capture distributional dynamics (it does not say much about inequalities), does not actually capture well-being (rather the economic output of production of market goods and services, within a country), and, importantly, does not say anything about the future (for instance, it does not take into account planetary boundaries). The speaker also presented the project’s findings recently published in a “global report” which introduces an alternative to the economic development narrative focused on key drivers of progress such as technology, globalization, institutions or nature. Finally, Jansen proposed to consider how to overcome the idea that progress has peaked, by looking at strategies which could bring to the fore a new uniting narrative to achieve sustainable and inclusive well-being, such implementing serious systemic change (decreasing growth dependencies for example) or curbing the power of big tech.
In his presentation, Edwin Horlings provided an in-depth reflection on the Elsewhere dimension of the Well-being Monitor currently in use (and being further developed) by CBS. Horlings highlighted how the Elsewhere dimension is fundamental to the definition of well-being but measuring the “consequences of the choices of the inhabitants of the Netherlands for the current and future well-being of people in other countries” is a particularly difficult task. To start with, the mandate of a national statistics office covers the national territory, but not across the border. This is an issue not only for the Netherlands, but for any other country. Secondly, there are conceptual issues that need to be addressed: for instance, while “Elsewhere” emphasizes effects in one particular direction, this is often difficult to establish namely by the existence of complex value chains. One strategy to try to overcome some of the difficulties is to focus on mechanisms rather than effects, such as measuring flows (of money and people) or pressure on the environment (such as emissions and resource depletion). Finally, Horlings highlighted the issues of normativity connected to the selection of indicators, which might involve attribution and responsibility: export of weapons, pesticides and waste and interference in the politics of other countries are examples of aspects to contend with. How to deal with things that people will have opinions about?
The last speaker of the afternoon, Dulce van Vliet, brought STONEM’s research agenda to the table. She started by highlighting that while digital technologies might have contributed to the creation of our increasingly datafied world, the apparent abundance of data is not a new phenomenon. In fact, throughout history, regulated representations such as indexes of names, accounting tables, flowchart diagrams or maps have consistently been used to organize information about the world. One of the goals of the STONEM project is to use the CBS well-being monitor as a heuristic model to investigate historical sustainability trade-offs, which means to redocument and to remap historical data streams into the current information paradigm (i.e. a regulated representation of the world organized in dimensions, themes and indicators). The advantages of using this monitor as a blueprint for historical research is that it discourages a (markedly) single perspective approach. By monitoring a many-sided perspective on sustainability, it allows for charting and exploring historical interactions between trade and living conditions, working conditions and personal and social changes, but also environmental pressures and economic development. The first steps include a thorough investigation of historical statistics created since the nineteenth century by national statistical offices such as CBS in the Netherlands, but also the Centraal Kantoor voor de Statistiek, in Indonesia.
In the final round table discussion, several topics were addressed. One issue that participants mentioned concerns our current definition of sustainability: do we need another definition of sustainability to look at history?