Search

Mainstream conceptualizations of sustainable development (SD) tend to focus on urban areas or the national or global scale—most recently through the Sustainable Development Goals. This focus often overlooks rural and natural resource-based communities, particularly those dependent on renewable resources like fisheries or forestry. Drawing from a comprehensive review, we propose an alternative approach for interpreting and measuring SD in these contexts. We integrate two seemingly contradictory approaches: sustainability indicators (SIs), whose evolution reflects competing views of the nature of knowledge and action in pursuit of SD, and the use of storytelling in policy and planning, highlighting how actors tell stories to garner support for proposed developments, influence public understanding, and mobilize stakeholders. Examining the opposing epistemologies often underlying these two approaches, we posit that they can be brought together through a transdisciplinary lens for sustainable rural development. We illustrate these potentials in Newfoundland and Labrador, a highly resource-based region in which rural communities are often characterized by deficiencies based narratives. In such contexts, storytelling can allow rural stakeholders to interpret SD while potentially enlisting SIs in telling their own sustainability stories.

This article seeks to address knowledge gaps on sustainability indicators (SIs) in rural and natural resource-dependent communities, considering how they are used to contextualize sustainable development priorities and support local governance. We build on recent scholarship on the potentials of SIs for stimulating societal transformation, extending this inquiry into rural and resource-based communities which have been under-represented in SI research. The governance challenges facing rural Canada, as well as its geographic and socio-economic diversity, provide a unique context for examining these issues. We provide relatively uncommon synthetic findings by compiling an inventory of SI initiatives across 39 rural communities and regions of Canada. Using the Community Capital Framework, we examine grey literature and academic publications related to each initiative spanning from 1999&ndash, 2019 to determine the breadth of sustainable development priorities considered. Informed by collaborative and multi-level governance frameworks, we explore how these initiatives are used to support multi-stakeholder collective action. This article finds that rural Canadian SI initiatives prioritize socio-cultural capital, with relatively fewer economic and ecological indicators, while identifying a typology of SI use and inter-related governance dynamics informing how these priorities and indicators are determined. Although some initiatives display highly collaborative and bottom-up processes, many rural Canadian SI initiatives are characterized by a data-driven approach that, when met with local capacity gaps, fails to contextualize standardized datasets to reflect rural realities. We encourage more in-depth investigation of these findings and comparison of Canadian experiences to other jurisdictions.

The challenges faced by municipalities in terms of integrated sustainability have until recently been difficult to study due to a lack of comparable data. This study discusses methods for conducting integrated sustainability assessments. One such method used by Telos, Tilburg University, has been further developed and used to benchmark local and regional sustainability development. In 2014, data for all 403 municipalities in the Netherlands on 90 indicators were retrieved, covering both economic, socio-cultural and environmental dimensions. The lessons learned are discussed, including the introduction of city typologies and the impact of the population size of municipalities on sustainability scores.