The Measurement of Sustainable Development Level in the Aspect of Selection of Indicators and Measurement Methods

Abstract

The idea of sustainable development appeared several decades ago and was a response to the growing environmental problems associated with the irrational natural resources management, conducted, in particular, by highly developed countries. Despite many local and international efforts, the list of universal indicators monitoring sustainable development, applicable both to developed and developing areas, has not yet been clearly defined. No specific methods for measuring sustainable development, which would allow for objective determination of the level of sustainability and the direction of its course, have been specified. The paper indicated the possibility of diversifying research results resulting from the adopted method of specification of sustainable development indicators and the applied method of measuring the level of sustainability, which may lead to unreliable results. A set of 71 indicators was employed and the various areas of sustainable development were described synthetically, i.e. the social, economic, environmental and institutional-political domains. The linear ordering of provinces was performed using their taxonomic distance from the reference object. For comparative purposes and determining the direction of development, data from the years 2010 and 2016 were utilized.