지방단위 지속가능발전지표 연구

Abstract

It is normally accepted that SDIs (Sustainable Development Indicators) comprises all of our concerns related to our economy, society and institutions as well as the environment. Economic, social and environmental indicators in past years are separately developed and applied in order to measure how far communities progress toward growth or development in each respective area. However, the indicators have been incorporated into SDIs with introduction to the conceptualization of environmental carrying capacity since sustainable development was defined by the Brundtland Commission in the early 1990’s. Recently, SDIs-related research tends to aim at not only suggesting a more-sophisticated list after collecting appropriate indicators, but also investigating causalities between indicator variables and elaborating a holistic and systematic model that makes it possible to assess longer-term development and social evolution. Based on this theoretical background, this study performs an empirical case study on SDIs. The cases covers national-, regional- and local-level SDIs in foreign developed countries including U. K., Germany, Japan, Taiwan and U. S., as well as Korea. The result reveals that SDIs are considerably different by the levels and the locations although the ways to view sustainable development are quite similar in most communities. This difference is attributed to the consequence of considering local characteristics of the environment and society in each community distinguished from ones in others. This argument seems to be available in the Korean SDIs, which at a national level have been developed mainly by KPCSD (Korean Presidential Comission on Sustainable Development), and which at regional/local level are by governmental agencies and LA21 (Local Agenda 21) bodies. This study furthermore suggests for the local executive bodies a set of guidelines desired during the process of introduction to and operation of SDIs, based on the holistic and systematic model mentioned above. The holistic and systematic model is abundant of feedback between economy, society and the environment, and therefore indicator developers and operators should make sense of the local environment, coupled by economic and social components, and consider the dynamics of the feedback. In the stage of applying SDIs and evaluating the sustainability of communities, local bodies should recognize it gets feedbacks from any political actions, and SDIs takes a role to find policy leverage so as to enhance the sustainability of regions/localities. Finally, this study investigates among the indicators in the cases and the statistics available, and present a comprehensive list of core indicators as a prototype SDI set of Korean regions/localities. Some candidate indicators are firstly selected in the list after a comparison/contrast analysis of the cases mentioned above, and then the list are condensed into one with fewer and more representative indicators by the PCA (Principal Component Analysis) method in the statistical factor analysis. The list is then refined to complete the prototype set of core indicators by consultation from field experts engaged in LA21 and to include more future-oriented indicators. It is sure that, in case of being applied to a specific community, these prototype SDIs should be adjusted in accordance with local and social circumstances of the community. It is obvious that the subsystems and their coupling structures in a community are different from ones in others. For that reason, this study firstly categorizes regions/locatities into some characteristic groups, and then derives more detailed indicators from the prototype set by each characteristic group. These detailed-indicator sets also should be adjusted into more practical one in case of application, the prototype and its detailed sets for characteristic groups should be regarded as generic indicators that are generally acceptable for average region/localities in Korea. Conclusively, this study illustrates and recommends local executive bodies to try to find sustainable development policy instruments with elaborating a generic system dynamics model of which components are the prototype SDI variables. In this model sustainable development can be achieved only by the balanced growth of all subsystems, such as economy, society, institution and environment, because every subsystem gets feedback from each other. The hole system could be collapsed if one of the subsystems fails to function properly, and sustainability can be regarded as a long-term stability of the hole system coupled by its subsystems. Therefore, local bodies are strongly recommended to adopt such a way of system thinking and to evaluate, with a indicator-system model/causal loop diagram, their own sustainability during the utilization of the SDIs.