Lars Fogh Mortensen
DESCRIPTION OF THE DRIVING FORCE-STATE-RESPONSE FRAMEWORK (DSR)
The Driving force -State -Response framework (DSR) was adopted by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) in 1995 as a tool for organizing information on sustainable development and for developing, presenting and analysing indicators of sustainable development. The framework is used in the CSD work programme on indicators of sustainable development (United Nations 1996a; see introductory Box). The objective of this work programme is to make indicators of sustainable development accessible to decision-makers at the national level by defining them, elucidating their methodologies and providing training and other capacity-building initiatives.
In the framework, driving force indicators represent human activities, processes and patterns that have an impact on sustainable development. These indicators provide an indication of the causes of positive and/or negative changes in the state of sustainable development. Driving force indicators can pertain to developments at the company level, in branches of industry or economic sectors, and also social trends. Examples of driving force indicators include the population growth rate which indicates the impact on sustainable development from an increased population and emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to changes in the state of the composition of the atmosphere.
State indicators provide an indication of the state of sustainable development, or a particular aspect of it, at a given point in time. This pertains to qualitative and/or quantitative indications. School life expectancy, (estimated number of years a student will remain enrolled in an educational institution) for example, is an indication of the state of the educational level. Ambient concentrations of pollutants in urban areas, as another example, provide an indication of the air quality in urban areas.
Response indicators indicate policy options and other responses to changes in the state of sustainable development. These indicators provide a measure of the willingness and effectiveness of a society in providing responses. Some responses to changes in the state of sustainable development can be legislation, regulation, economic instruments, information activities etc. Examples of response indicators include waste water treatment coverage and expenditure on air pollution abatement.
Categories of sustainable development and all chapters of Agenda 21 are reflected in the framework, in which there is a distinction between the following four categories of sustainable development: social, economic, environmental, and institutional. The underlying assumption is that sustainable development includes a variety of social, economic, environmental and institutional components. In the environmental category, the following sub-categories have been used: water, land, other natural resources, atmosphere, and waste (United Nations 1996a).
The DSR framework has also been used by the World Bank in its work on indicators of environmentally sustainable development (World Bank 1995). In addition, several other organizations and countries have recently begun using the framework in the development and use of indicators of sustainable development.
CSD CRITERIA FOR SELECTING INDICATORS INCLUDED IN THE FRAMEWORK
In the DSR framework, used in the work programme on indicators of the CSD, the indicators have been selected in accordance with a number of criteria. The criteria are to some extent similar to the criteria used by other organizations, but differ in their particular focus on the relevance to Agenda 21 and all aspects of sustainable development. The criteria used by the CSD are the following:
(a) primarily national in scale or scope (countries may also wish to use indicators at
state and provincial levels);
(b) relevant to the main objective of assessing progress towards sustainable development;
(c) understandable, that is to say, clear, simple and unambiguous;
(d) realizable within the capacities of national governments, given logistic, time,
technical and other constraints;
(e) conceptually well-founded;
(f) limited in number, remaining open-ended and adaptable to future developments;
(g) relevant to Agenda 21 and covering broadly all aspects of sustainable
development;
(h) representative of international consensus, to the greatest extent possible;
(i) dependant on data that are readily available or available at a reasonable cost to
benefit ratio, adequately documented, of well known quality, and updated at regular
intervals.
As indicated in the criteria, the indicators have been developed for use at the national level. This means that the indicators are selected from their ability to monitor progress towards sustainable development at the national level. To be useful for decision-makers at the national level, it is important that the indicators are understandable and realizable within the capacities of national governments. The indicators should be conceptually well-founded, meaning that the underlying methodology is available. The limitation in the number of indicators is important to ensure that the indicators provide indication of only the main aspects of sustainable development, rather than on all thinkable aspects of sustainable development. The indicators are, to the greatest extent possible, based on data which is readily available in most countries or data which can be collected and analysed at a reasonable cost. The relevance to Agenda 21 and the coverage of all aspects of sustainable development are important in order for the indicators to monitor what they are meant to monitor, namely progress achieved towards sustainable development at the national level.
The relevance to the DSR framework and the placement of the indicators in the framework has not been used directly as a criteria in the selection of the indicators. Instead, indicators have been identified for each cell using the above criteria. A consequence is that the number of indicators in each cell varies considerably from zero to seven indicators. This contributes to ensuring that only the most relevant indicators are selected and to identifying areas for which suitable indicators do not yet exist.
The indicators included in the framework have been selected, using the above criteria, by the CSD and its Secretariat, in close cooperation with a large number of international governmental and non-governmental organizations and national governments. The continuing involvement of other organizations and governments is important in order to ensure broad agreement on the indicators selected. For the indicators included in the DSR framework, methodology sheets have been developed by lead organizations, in cooperation with the CSD Secretariat, UN-system organizations and other inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations. This ensures that the methodology is described by organizations with broad expertise in the area each indicator describes (see introductory Box).
A major advantage of the DSR framework is that it organizes information on sustainable development systematically in a way that guides the user of the framework and the indicators through all aspects of sustainable development. In distinguishing between the social, economic, environmental and institutional aspects of sustainable development, the framework ensures that no aspects of sustainable development is automatically excluded. The inclusion of the economic, social and institutional aspects is particularly important for developing countries and countries with economies in transition, for whom an equal balance between the developmental and environmental aspects of sustainable development is important in order to ensure future sustainable growth patterns.
THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN DRIVING FORCE, STATE AND RESPONSE INDICATORS
The DSR framework used by the CSD has basically been adapted from the Pressure - state -Response framework (PSR) used by the OECD in its work on environmental indicators, In the DSR framework, the term pressure has been replaced by that of driving force in order to accommodate the inclusion of economic, social and institutional aspects of sustainable development. The term 'driving force' indicates, as mentioned above, an impact on sustainable development. This impact can be both positive and negative, which is not the case for the pressure category used by the OECD. This is particularly relevant for some driving forces which have a positive impact on the developmental aspects of sustainable development, but a negative impact on the environmental aspects.
Some organizations and governments, for example the European Environment Agency (EEA 1996), distinguish between driving forces and pressures in the development and use of environmental indicators. The reasoning behind this distinction is that driving forces can be seen as activities that have an impact on the pressure on the environment. However, for information and indicators focusing on all aspects of sustainable development, this distinction would not be particularly useful. The reason is that the term 'pressure' is not an accurate reflection of the impacts of human activities on sustainable development, which can be positive and/or negative.
The state category in the DSR framework indicates, as mentioned above, the state of a particular aspect of sustainable development. However, some organizations divide the state category into two sub-categories. For example, the Pressure-State- Impact-Respo