Applied Research in Quality of Life (2006) 1:253–277
DOI 10.1007/s11482-007-9020-8
Revisiting the Local Impact of Community Indicators
Projects: Sustainable Seattle as Prophet
in Its Own Land
Meg Holden
Received: 26 July 2006 / Accepted: 24 February 2007 /
Published online: 21 April 2007
# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. /
The International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) 2007
Abstract Sustainable Seattle’s Indicators of Sustainable Community project was the
first of its kind and remains one of the best known attempts by a community group
to measure a wide range of what it values most about local quality of life and
sustainability. The great irony in the organization’s notoriety, however, is that S2’s
reputation grows with distance from its home in Seattle. National and international
recognition has come to S2 much more easily than uptake and implementation of the
project, its method, or its recommendations at home in Seattle and King County.
This article, based on case study research, provides a closer examination of this
received wisdom about the limited local impact of Sustainable Seattle by
foregrounding the local legacy of this first generation indicators project in the form
of nine different indicator projects that have succeeded the S2 project. All of these
projects bear some connection to S2 and can be shown to constitute second, third
and fourth generation indicator projects in terms of organizational structure,
indicator framework, and approach to mobilizing awareness and policy and
behavioural change. This article also offers lessons from indicator projects in the
Seattle area about the appeal of an indicators-based approach generally, and the
various Seattle models in particular, from the perspective of different key policy
actor groups. In sum, the research presented in this article contributes to filling the
gap in the community indicators literature with regard to the policy impacts of
community indicator projects in their localities and directions for increasing the
effectiveness of projects from the perspectives of different indicator organizations
and policy actor groups.
Keywords Community indicator projects . Seattle . King County . Sustainable Seattle
All websites verified as of 5 February 2007.
M. Holden (*)
Urban Studies and Geography, Simon Fraser University Vancouver,
3rd Floor, 515 W. Hastings St., Vancouver, BC V6B 5K3, Canada
e-mail: mholden@sfu.ca
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Introduction: The First Generation Sustainability Indicators Project
Sustainable Seattle (S2) created the world’s first community quality of life indicators
project with an explicit local sustainability orientation in the early 1990s. To describe
the project’s impact, the received wisdom has been that even during the project’s
heyday in the mid-1990s: the farther one sits from Seattle, the more likely one is to
consider S2 an influential project. This result is not particularly surprising; after all,
the challenge of becoming a prophet in one’s own land is one of biblical difficulty.
This article, however, posits that this result is not entirely true. Close case study
analysis reveals the mostly-overlooked local legacy of Sustainable Seattle’s hallmark
indicator project. In examining the waves of innovation and diffusion in community
sustainability indicator project approaches and outcomes in the Seattle area, this
article also presents results of the receptiveness of different key policy actor groups
to indicator-based approaches to sustainability and quality of life in local
governance.
S2 has served as a model from which many community indicator studies have
grown. The nonprofit research organization Redefining Progress conducted a survey
of indicator organizations in 1998 and determined that over half (54%) of the 170
indicator groups surveyed cited Sustainable Seattle as a motivator or model for their
project (Redefining Progress 2000).1 Moreover, S2 has been known not only for the
successful production of three indicator reports in 1993, 1995, and 1998, but also for
the process through which it developed these reports and its success in gaining
international notoriety. The S2 process has been noted in the Bellagio Principles for
Assessment of sustainability indicator projects (Hardi and Zdan 1997), cited in
books on sustainable development (Portney 2003; Lewis and Buttel 2001; AtKisson
1999; Miller 1999), comparative reports and articles (Mitra 2003; Greenwood 2001;
Sustainable Northwest and Oregon Solutions 2001; Baker 1999; Meter 1999; Farrell
and Hart 1998; Jackson and Roberts 1997; Pinfield 1997; Brugmann 1997; Leibman
and El-Eini 1996; Andrews 1996; Zachary 1995; Russel 1994), and academic theses
(Holden 2004; Jacob 1996; Cash Driskill 1998; Gahin 2001). Many newspaper
articles outside Seattle have made mention of Sustainable Seattle (Yerton 2001; Stille
2000; Navares 1995; Lindecke 1994; Glessing 1994; Meadows 1993).
S2 members’ intent was to initiate and contribute to a city-wide conversation
about sustainable development that in time would lead to a new system of urban
policy and practice. To S2 members, it made sense to design their project and its
process by the key components of this new system: an emphasis on measuring and
monitoring, collaboration between citizens, experts and decision-makers, linking
indicators into a holistic framework, and the sharing of decision-making power via
better information, communication and dialogue (Holden 2006). In taking this
approach, S2 worked toward an impact on the policy process that did not take the
form of specific new policies. This was a very contentious decision, that garnered S2
harsh criticism from Jeb Brugmann, at the time the Secretary General of the
1
This survey was led by Sustainable Seattle co-founder Alan AtKisson after he left Seattle to work for
Redefining Progress, along with other Redefining Progress staff. In 2003, this global directory of indicator
initiatives reached a total of 589 initiatives and in 2006, 684 initiatives were listed (http://www.iisd.org/
measure/compendium/).
Revisiting the local impact of community indicators projects
255
International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, the organization that
drafted Local Agenda 21, in the journal Local Environment.
Brugmann (1997, 64) criticized Sustainable Seattle’s failure to change formal city
policy, thus casting doubt on the importance of process to the quest of reducing
uncertainty in knowledge more generally. He linked this failure to the organization’s
independent nonprofit status, “without connection to major institutions, generally,
and the City’s strategic and statutory planning processes, specifically.” Because of
this separation, he referred to the overall effect of Sustainable Seattle’s Indicators of
Sustainable Community on local policies as “catalytic” at best, an effect he considers
far from satisfactory. In a response to this criticism, Pinfield (1997) emphasized the
alternative view of the importance of the citizen-based process model spearheaded
by Sustainable Seattle, for the very reason Brugmann derided. In this alternate view,
Sustainable Seattle served a critically important role to reduction in uncertainty
around sustainability by playing a catalytic role in which the organization’s process
facilitated the wider diffusion of specific and locally-relevant ideas and measures of
sustainable development, improving the quantity and quality of democratic debate
about specific policy issues as well as for the direction of urban development in the
region more generally. Instead of backing particular policy proposals, S2 sought to
create the kind of regional knowledge that “influences as it becomes internalized in
the shared understanding of a community” (Innes 1990, 35) engaged in democratic
debate. This type of change occurs as debates are framed and agendas set: “as part of
taken-for-granted assumptions, which frame problems and put bounds on the
solution options” rather than in any rational information processing in selecting
among policy alternatives. As an innovative civic organization with no formal
scientific or political authority, Sustainable Seattle also served as an inspiration for
many other groups locally and around the world to undertake similar processes in
their own contexts. In investigating S2’s effectiveness at making this change, it is
useful to examine any diffusion of ideas that has occurred from S2 to other groups
and individuals engaged in the sustainability, quality-of-life, and community health
policy fields in the local region.
Literature Review: Diffusion and Use of Community Indicator Studies
For those working to define and improve community quality of life toward
sustainable futures, the tool of the indicator project has become one of the most
popular. Indicators like Gross Domestic Product, the consumer price index, and life
expectancy at birth have long been used in the policy craft (Porter 1995).
Community indicator projects attempt to deepen these measures in the pool of
human values, recognizing that not just how much we produce, what we pay, and
how long we live determines the worth of our cities; urban worth is also reflected in
the nature, relationships, and quality of our lives. Indicator projects can enumerate a
larger and more forward- and backward-looking set of values in social, environmental, and economic realms. They attempt to keep track of our progress in new
dimensions of human responsibility and concern (Maclaren 1996; Michalos 1997).
While the practice of community indicators has grown in popularity since the early
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1990s, evidence of the effectiveness of this work on improving decisions made that
impact community quality of life remains scarce.
From experience developing Boston’s sustainability indicator program, Kline
(2001) suggests at least ten benefits of the process of conducting such a project,
regardless of the direct policy results. These benefits include: revealing core
concerns rather than piecemeal symptoms of urban problems; grasping the integrated
and regional nature of urban problems; the ability to measure outcomes as well as
changes in process and policy; the ability to measure progress at the different scales
of neighborhood, city and region; setting the community’s own priorities; flexibility
in implementation choices underlain by clear goals; the ability to focus on positive in
addition to negative changes; paying attention to questions of maintenance,
replacement and reuse; addressing issues of equity; and including qualitative as
well as quantitative measures.
Attention to such soft impacts of community indicator projects requires an
understanding of the community decision-making process that is more nuanced than
the rational model. It is uncontroversial, even somewhat trite, to say that power
influences the policy process more than indicators or facts do (Flyvbjerg 1998). Less
common is the examination of factors which influence policy outcomes other than
strict evidence and power dynamics, such as uncertainty (Heclo 1974), local energy,
knowledge, and motivations (Hirschman 1971), learning from prior policy outcomes
(Dunn 1971), organizational and institutional learning (Wenger 1999), and bounded
conflict (Lee 1993). Policymakers customarily work within a framework of ideas and
standards that specify not only the goals of policy and the kind of instruments used to
attain them but also the very nature of the problems they are to address (Hall 1993).
Eckerberg and Mineur (2003) develop a typology for understanding the various
development strategies for sustainability indicator projects at the municipal scale and
determine that these different approaches to developing sustainability indicators
affects their use. The typology differentiates the two ideal types of projects as citizenor expert-oriented according to what indicators are measured, how the project defines
sustainable development, the purpose and intended audience of the project, the
organizational and political context in which the project is embedded and the actors
involved. Five distinct indicator projects in use in two Swedish municipalities,
Stockholm and Sundsvall, are examined according to this typology. Differences
among these projects point to future ways to examine the development and use of
municipal-level sustainability indicator projects, and point in particular to the need for
much more attention to improving the participatory and democratic nature of projects,
beyond citizen involvement in initial project development. Involvement of policy
actors from outside traditional government in problem definition, instrument
selection and design, and analysis of problem trends and goals via community
indicator projects can bring about changes in policy direction and the status quo, even
if these changes are not immediately apparent in the formal policy process.
Research Approach and Methodology
Research for this article was conducted using embedded single case study
methodology. Embedded case study methodology involves identifying and investi-
Revisiting the local impact of community indicators projects
257
gating different units and subunits of analysis. In this case, the unit of analysis is the
organization Sustainable Seattle, whose signature work has been a sustainability
indicators project, and the subunits are subsequent and resultant indicator initiatives
in Seattle, King County, and Washington State. Embedded case study research
enables the researcher to reveal deeper and more holistic understandings of “cultural
systems of action,” which are “sets of interrelated activities and routines engaged in
by one or more networks of actors within a social context that is bounded in time
and space” (Snow and Anderson 1991, 152; Yin 1984). A local sustainability
indicator project that demonstrates a range of diverse interpersonal and institutional
relationships is a good example of a cultural system of action. A cultural system may
range in scope from small groups to whole communities.
Data were gathered from a mixture of cooperative and unobtrusive methods. The
unobtrusive methods were historical analysis using archival and policy documents
and news sources, along with a limited amount of participant observation. The
cooperative method was in-depth interviewing, including elite and informal
interviews. Two lists of interviewees were drafted: one list of historical and current
members of Sustainable Seattle and one list of people active in Seattle sustainability,
quality of life and healthy community policy processes from five key groups (elected
leaders, local government employees, nonprofit organizations, active citizens, and
businesses). Within each list, maximum variation sampling was used to select
interviewees. Maximum variation sampling is a nonprobability, judgmental sampling
technique in which as wide a sample as possible is drawn from preselected
categories until exhaustion or redundancy is reached within the category (Lincoln
and Guba 1985).2
Document and archival data review and newspaper review occurred from
February 2002 through August 2003 and consisted of a systematic review of all
retrievable documents from Sustainable Seattle’s archives, personal archives of some
of its founding members and a systematic but more selective review of policy
documents from relevant City of Seattle and King County agencies, and news
articles related to sustainable development policy. Interview data, archival data,
policy documents, and news report data have been triangulated, or cross-referenced
in order to provide a multiple perspective analysis of the diffusion of Sustainable
Seattle’s indicator project process and strategy and the receptiveness of different
groups to using indicators in their work.
Results: The Local Legacy of Sustainable Seattle
Nine sustainability indicator projects that originated subsequent to S2 were
discovered and investigated for their connections to Sustainable Seattle and are
2
Seventy-one interviews were conducted. These included, in overlapping categories, interviews with 14
former members of Sustainable Seattle, including all but one of the organization’s founding members, nine
members of the Sustainable Seattle board, four elected leaders, 29 city and county government employees,
one state government employee, 26 people involved in nonprofit organizations (including research and
education), six politically-active unaffiliated citizens, one newspaper reporter and nine people employed in
for-profit sustainability-oriented businesses. Gender and racial balance among those interviewed was also
a goal of this research methodology. Interviewees included 33 women and 11 people of color.
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Table 1 Sustainable Seattle’s local legacy of sustainability indicator projects
Second generation
indicator projects
State
County/region
Third generation indicator
projects
Fourth generation indicator
projects
Sustainable
Washington Advisory Panel
(2003, 2004)
PSRC Puget Sound Milestones
(2001–2005)
Growth Management
Communities Count
Benchmarks
(2000, 2003, 2005)
(1996–2006)
PSRC Regional Review
(1997, 1998)
City
Comprehensive
Department of Information Environmental Action Agenda
Plan Indicators
Technology indicators
(2002, 2005, 2006)
(1996, 1998, 2003)
(2002, 2004)
Nongovernment
Northwest Environment Watcha
(now: Sightline Institute)
(2004–2006) Cascadia
Scorecard
a
Northwest Environment Watch (NEW) is now known as the Sightline Institute. It will be referred to in
this article by the name it had at the time of research, NEW.
considered part of the S2 local legacy. These projects are listed in Table 1, according
to scale and ‘generation,’ a classification that reflects commonality of approach as
well as timing of origin following S2.
Each generation represents a different approach to the organization, intent and
application of indicators, as summarized in Table 2. Relative to the organization,
intent and application of indicators in the S2 model, these projects represent different
approaches to:
&
&
&
Collaboration in the organization of the project and the role of the public and
leaders,
Measuring linkages among different indicators and dimensions of sustainability,
and
Targeting the use, integration into decision-making, and mobilizing power of the
indicators.
For second generation indicator projects, concerned with monitoring trends in
growth management and comprehensive plans, the main dimension of change beyond
the S2 model has been in the linkages dimension. The Puget Sound Regional Council
(PSRC) began a series of reports to update policy makers and citizens on the region’s
progress toward growth management goals established in the Vision 2020 long term
land use plan (Puget Sound Regional Council 1990, 1995). King County developed a
set of benchmarks (King County GMPC and Office of Budget 1998–2006) to fulfill its
legal commitment to the State of Washington Growth Management Act (1990) as well
as the Countywide Planning Policies (King County Growth Management Planning
Council 1994, 2005). The City of Seattle (1994, 2005) developed indicators to
demonstrate the city’s progress toward the Comprehensive Plan goals (City of Seattle
Department of Design, Construction and Land Use 2003).
For third generation projects, which have expanded the scope of community
indicators beyond legal requirements and growth management into social, health,
Revisiting the local impact of community indicators projects
259
Table 2 Key features of second, third, and fourth generation indicator projects
2nd generation
3rd generation
4th generation
Collaboration
Indicators for legal and
policy compliance
Community-defined
indicator values
Indicators for appeal
to leaders and media
Linkages
Indicators for comprehensive
growth management
implementation and
monitoring
Indicators tied to
specific policies
Broad public participation in
indicator generation
Respect for qualitative
information and
underrepresented groups
Indicators for expanding
and defining the scope
of sustainable development
Intent to empower
civic groups
Strategy to improve
indicator positioning
in policy decisions
Specific targets set
and responsibilities
established
Powersharing
Indicators used as grant
criteria
Selecting fewer
indicators at broader
spatial scales
and information technology realms, change has occurred from the Sustainable
Seattle model primarily along collaborative lines. King County produced a
comprehensive social and health indicator set called Communities Count (Public
Health-Seattle and King County 2000, 2003, 2005) and Seattle produced a set of
indicators encapsulating the effects of information technology on the community
(City of Seattle Information Technology Indicators Project 2002).
Fourth generation projects, when viewed in relation to the Sustainable Seattle model,
demonstrate a more focused vision of collaboration and the beginning of new powersharing strategies. These projects include then-Governor Locke’s Sustainable Washington
Advisory Panel (2003, 2004) indicators, the Puget Sound Regional Council Puget Sound
Milestones (2001–2005) project, the City of Seattle Office of Sustainability and
Environment (2002, 2005, 2006) (OSE) Environmental Action Agenda, and the
nongovernment organization Northwest Environment Watch’s (now: Sightline Institute)
(2004–2006) Cascadia Scorecard. Both the Governor’s Panel and the OSE projects
directly involve leaders from Sustainable Seattle. Puget Sound Milestones and the
Cascadia Scorecard are the only two of the nine projects without a direct tie to S2 or its
members. The Puget Sound Milestones project has an indirect link as it does follow
from the PSRC Regional Review, and the Cascadia Scorecard project developed based
on informed decisions to move away from the S2 approach resulting from the
experience of Northwest Environment Watch staff engaged with S2 indicator process.
The assessment framework according to which each generation is discussed
below includes the attempt to monitor change, constant among all projects, the
extent of collaboration amongst different sectors and interested groups, the
consideration of linkages among indicators toward an integrated sustainable
development view, and power-sharing for increasing indicator project impact.
Second Generation Indicator Projects
Seattle’s second generation indicator projects show little commitment to collaboration. They derive directly from legislation and policy, although one project, the
Comprehensive Plan indicator project, shows an understanding of the value of
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collaboration through its use of community-defined values in indicator selection.
These projects demonstrate a drive for comprehensive indicator sets covering the
range of social, economic, and ecological issues associated with population growth
and urban development in order to link these explicitly to growth management and
planning policies. King County’s Growth Management Benchmark program has 45
indicators to monitor progress toward growth management goals, PSRC Regional
Review measured 31 indicators, and the Comprehensive Plan indicators included 25
measures.
The sheer number of indicators selected in each of the second generation projects
is evidence of this breadth and certain indicators within each set demonstrate
recognition of the linked nature of different physical and social conditions to the task
of growth management planning. Each project includes indicators that one would not
necessarily expect to see under the heading ‘growth management,’ indicating that a
broad and comprehensive perspective has been taken. The Benchmark project, for
example, includes an indicator ‘High school graduation rate’ under the Economy
heading and ‘Ratio of land consumption to population growth’ under Land Use.
PSRC’s Regional Review includes the indicator ‘City Park Acreage as a Percentage
of Total City Area’ under ‘Rural Preservation.’ The Comprehensive Plan indicators
include a measure of ‘Commuting to Work’ under ‘Environmental Stewardship.’
King County Executive Ron Sims’ thinking about indicators reflects his
understanding of the importance of linkages among the kinds of measures being
collected, what these mean to the larger condition they are trying to affect, and how
the process of measuring and monitoring can lead to policy spin-offs and advances.
Following a chain of linked indicators related to wild salmon decline, for example,
an indicator monitored by Sustainable Seattle, enabled Sims to reframe policy issues
around environment and development in King County. Sims listened to ecologists in
order to develop his position, in his own policy language, on fish and amphibian
decline, microenvironments, the need for shade trees along stream banks, and the
removal of exotic species. He explained:
In the past, we looked at wetlands habitat as being needed for the protection of
salmon, because we had a fish measure. Now we realize that wetlands function
well away from streams, rivers, and lakes, because they create microhabitats for
a variety of species ... we thought we were doing this great job by acquiring all
this wetland and protecting all the shoreland and ... now we don’t do that: a
wetlands policy stands on its own. And we look at microenvironments.3
In addition to this evidence of a broadening understanding of the interrelated
nature of different policy domains, second generation projects represent an increase
in government accountability, which broadens the power base. This is the difference
between King County’s Growth Management Benchmarks program, for example,
and King County’s Annual Growth Report, which is a statistical abstract of growth
measures that has been published by the county since 1983. Because the
Benchmarks program is tied to the Countywide Planning Policies (King County
Growth Management Planning Council 1994, 2005) and mandated by state
3
Ron Sims, King County Executive, interview 15 May 2002.
Revisiting the local impact of community indicators projects
261
legislation, it represents a new kind of accountability for King County. Project
founder Cynthia Moffitt emphasizes: “that was really, really important to us – that
we tie every indicator to a particular policy. We just didn’t pull them out of thin air.
We chose the policy first because . . . everybody agreed on this, all the cities. This is
the way we’re going to grow for the next 20 years.”4
Operating inside local government, the major effect of second generation
indicator projects has been to increase government accountability to implement
policies in ways that make a difference to measured indicator trends. PSRC created
its Milestones reports in order to clarify connections one indicator at a time. Along
similar lines, King County intends to begin publishing an outline of the indicator set
side by side with the most relevant policies for each Benchmark indicator. The 2003
City of Seattle Comprehensive Plan indicator report makes policy implications
clearer by citing specific plan goals and implementation tools in place that may
affect each trend. These projects are vital information sources for policy analysts and
citizen groups engaged in the policy process. Although not all government
employees are convinced of the utility of this information and the reports are
underutilized by citizen groups as well, to Moffitt, the work remains valuable. Even
if this information is not immediately applied in policy development, its continued
tracking and reporting preserves a new opportunity to measure progress against
performance for as far back as the data allow: “so as long as we continue to look at
the trends . . . that’s really valuable information that we’ve never put together
before.”5
Third Generation Indicator Projects
Seattle’s third generation indicator projects have used sophisticated and widereaching collaborative public participation processes in project design, based on and
expanded from that of S2. Both projects contracted with S2 to design the indicator
selection process and both demonstrate significant learning and extending the
collaborative design used by S2. They also showed mutual respect between expert
and nonexpert forms of knowledge by including qualitative information gathered
from underrepresented groups. Taking the prime example, much of the information
gathered from underrepresented groups had never before been collected and was of
critical importance to representing trends for the entire community.
The Communities Count process demonstrates significant learning from and
surpassing S2 about how to conduct a broad public participation process from a base
within government. The Communities Count process involved more people from a
larger spatial area than did S2, and collected more primary data, improving the local
relevance of the information and enlarging the body of support for the project. Even
though many of S2’s indicators did in fact apply beyond city limits, the perception of
the project, owing to its name and the extent of its public participation and
distribution processes, was restricted to within the City of Seattle. Communities
Count’s county-wide focus made broader support for this project possible from
4
Cynthia Moffitt, King County Policy Analyst, interview 19 March 2002.
5
See footnote no. 4.
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M. Holden
funders, King County and local governments outside Seattle, and underserved
citizens. Project manager Sandy Ciske explains that the participatory process
followed by Communities Count made primary data collection necessary: “as
government, when you ask people what matters, they come up with a lot of things
that aren’t available in secondary data.” Measures of social and community health
are scarcely available; they are: “the kind of thing that has been least likely to be
captured in any formalized data collection that is institutionalized by government or
private”6 agencies.
Executive Sims noted the Communities Count report’s value for forecasting
problems that may be lurking behind the level of widespread public awareness and
policy action. For example, Sims said: “We don’t want to say that we’re saving the
fish and watch housing affordability become increasingly more difficult.”7 Nea
Carroll, founding member of S2 who assisted Communities Count on behalf of S2,
noted the breadth with which the Communities Count steering group defined public
health: “[the process] did I think open up their thinking to a more whole-system
approach to health. I think it’s done a lot of whole systems consciousness-raising.”8
The large public involvement process that determined the indicator set helped to
incorporate some controversial measures into Communities Count. An important
example of this is the result from the telephone survey that income inequality was a
major determinant of social and health inequalities. Although members of the
steering group were wary of including a measure like this that would risk alienating
“people in this community that have money,” they could not refute that this was an
important measure that needed to be included because it was important to the people
whom the project intended to serve. These arguments caused a shake-down within
the steering group in which the members most strenuously opposed to these
community-driven indicator decisions resigned and the remaining group maintained
this focus.9 To Ciske, the ability of participants to determine the content of the
project altered the nature of the project from one oriented toward politics internal to
government agencies and their allies toward a project with a populist agenda.
Similar to the case with Communities Count, the process design for the
Department of Information Technology (DoIT) indicators project was based on that
of S2. DoIT used S2’s managerial assistance and improved on the S2 process by
collecting more primary data and including a series of telephone surveys. The
process has been subject to citizen guidance and review at every stage. The indicator
selection process began with a 1-day public forum in February 2000, entitled
“Technology and the Community: What Should a Healthy Future Look Like?” The
event drew 135 participants from across the city’s neighborhood groups, social
service providers, business people, local politicians, representatives of educational
and recreational institutions, and activists. At this forum, important value categories
were set, along with initial possibilities for indicators within those categories. Next,
DoIT selected a technical advisory committee of 20–25 experts in data collection and
6
Sandy Ciske, King County Division of Epidemiology, Planning and Evaluation Program Analyst,
interview 10 January 2002.
7
See footnote no. 3.
8
Nea Carroll, S2 Co-founder and consultant to Communities Count, interview 18 April 2002.
9
Lee Hatcher, S2 former Director and consultant to Communities Count, interview 20 June 2002.
Revisiting the local impact of community indicators projects
263
analysis as well as the various fields of education, technology, business and
community development. This advisory committee filled remaining topical gaps in
public forum results by narrowing the field to 60 potential indicators. Certain
participants were recontacted via email as the work progressed to further narrow the
indicator set. The draft indicators and values were distributed to all public forum
participants, who were asked to submit comments back to the technical advisory
group. The draft was revised and sent out for another iteration of comments and
revision, resulting in the final indicator set.
Four supplementary reports to the final indicator report were published, covering
specific survey results, and a new residential technology survey was undertaken in
2004. These surveys provided a way to include more people in the public process,
like small business leaders, small neighborhood groups, and new immigrants. Each
report presented results of a telephone survey conducted with different interest
groups regarding the group’s access to and use of information technology.
Alongside this process, a smaller working group consisting of members of the
Citizen’s Community Technology Advisory Board met to discuss higher-level
issues, such as how to make the project’s scope manageable. Project director David
Keyes reported that the project “was much bigger than I certainly ever thought it was
going to be and there was a lot more interest as well.” This result speaks once again
to the interest of citizens in value-setting and “big picture” processes, making the
broad “technology-healthy community” approach of the DoIT indicator project more
attractive to citizens than predicted by government employees.10
Both third generation projects, through their choice of S2 for project management
and support and through other steps to conceive the project in broad sustainability
terms, represent a willingness on the part of project leaders to embrace the breadth
and holistic framework represented by sustainability. This is a step forward from
traditional approaches to the management of social, health and information
technology programs.
Fourth Generation Indicator Projects
Fourth generation projects departed from third generation-style collaboration,
designing a dissemination model in which the target audience is more focused and
the collaboration more selective. Among fourth generation projects, the City Office
of Sustainability and Environment Environmental Action Agenda indicators assume
a new level of power and influence by setting targets for each indicator that specific
city departments have responsibility for reaching. The NEW project has taken
power-sharing in a different direction, developing strategies to explicitly move the
project into the hands and minds of decision-makers and to position the organization
for consultation on policy alternatives.
As opposed to engaging in a participatory, community-based process to select the
indicator set, NEW followed a more expert-based process. The model NEW aspired
to was that of the Doomsday Clock, a project to measure society’s political
10
David Keyes, City of Seattle DoIT Indicators Project Director, interview 25 July 2002.
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proximity to nuclear holocaust using the metaphor of a clock.11 This project appealed
to NEW because it was a memorable and effective communications device that was
appealing enough to the media to get regular coverage: “It was a communications
device for getting lots of people to stop what they’re doing and think for a moment
about nuclear holocaust and it was extraordinarily effective.”12
After assembling approximately 1,000 different indicators from a range of
indicator reports worldwide and 30 reports within the bioregion, research director
Clark Williams-Derry and other NEW staff set about determining which indicators
would work best. In contrast with the approach of second generation projects, the
intent was to find a very small number of indicators with the maximum power in
revealing trends across the broadest possible policy spectrum. The selection process
involved consultation with experts in specific fields related to each selected indicator
topic. Among the questions asked of indicators was whether each was intuitively
compelling and adequately comprehensible for scientists and journalists alike. This
question was not asked for the broader public and non-experts were not invited to
comment.13
NEW’s expert-based approach to indicator selection was taken for practical
reasons of time and money constraints and to limit the number of indicators in the
final set. The organization could not afford the time and resources required to
conduct an effective community process at the bioregional scale. Also, the
organization did not consider a broad-based community process capable of
narrowing the indicator set down to a very small number. More indicative power
from a smaller set of measures was traded against the other option of involving more
people and values in indicator selection. NEW Executive Director Alan Durning
made this trade-off explicitly to avoid S2’s experience of failing to provide a single,
consistent, compelling story in its indicator reports:
Many of the indicator projects [using Sustainable Seattle as a prototype] came up
with a grab bag of different things that told no single compelling story. They had
no consistent point of view because everyone was at the table creating them. . .
they operated by consensus and they had so many different views represented
that they never could get to a smaller list for a single story. It’s like trying to make
a feature film through a community involvement process or write a novel by a
committee – it doesn’t work. So you end up with Sustainable Seattle’s 40
indicators . . . and that approach is fantastic as a data set for professionals but if
you’re trying to move an agenda with major media outlets who are pressed for
time and want to know what’s going on, then . . .14
Specifying a target audience also enabled NEW to develop an indicator project
that communicates directly to the “felt-need” of the audience. In other words, NEW
recognized that their project must “tell [targeted readers] something they care about”
11
The Doomsday Clock was developed by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 and regularly
calculates and reports symbolically the global level nuclear danger http://www.thebulletin.org/doomsday_
clock/.
12
Alan Durning, Executive Director Northwest Environment Watch, interview 11 July 2003.
13
Clark Williams-Derry, Research Director Northwest Environment Watch, interview 25 March 2003.
14
See footnote no. 12.
Revisiting the local impact of community indicators projects
265
and “be somehow connected to action.” NEW recognized that policy makers, upon
reading an indicator, immediately want to know how the indicator can be applied to
a policy context in order to maximize the performance of that policy-maker’s office.
Fourth generation indicator projects are working harder for name recognition, having
learned from past generations that simply providing better information is only half
the battle to using the information to improve the quality of policy debate.
To ensure that they meet these goals, NEW has used a “consumer product
marketing model” in project development. Project staff consist equally of people with
indicator expertise and those with marketing and communications expertise. The
marketing model features briefings on the project, fundraising events, and focus
groups with business management consultants and separate groups of conservative
and liberal consumers. In addition, NEW completed two rounds of in-depth interviews
with opinion leaders. The first round tested proposed messages and measures. The
second round was conducted for NEW by other opinion leaders already committed to
the project. NEW hopes to help leaders connect indicators and policies, to become “the
region’s policy eyes” in this respect: “we’re trying to position ourselves as an
organization that has useful and interesting ideas to give to leaders and the media about
not just environmental things but also social things as well.”15
The Environmental Action Agenda, Puget Sound Milestones, and the Governor’s
Sustainability Panel projects share with the NEW project a renewed emphasis on
design and presentation to make the indicator reports attractive and accessible to the
public and opinion leaders. This was key to the S2 project as well, but received less
attention during second and third generation projects that were more concerned with
pre-report public access to inform the selection process. OSE (2003) has limited the
main themes of its Environmental Action Agenda to three, with a total of only 16
indicators, and has emphasized communications and outreach strategies. Puget
Sound Milestones has gone further by reporting on only one indicator at a time, once
or twice yearly. Limiting the number of indicators and improving their presentation
improves the post-report-production accessibility of the indicator reports.
An additional consideration of linkages apparent among fourth generation
indicator project leaders is the notion of improving linkages between the indicator
projects themselves without duplicating effort. In the case of the statewide
sustainability indicators tasked to the Governor’s Panel, the route to nonduplication
was the inclusion of NEW and S2 leaders and the initial focus on combining and
repackaging indicators already reported in individual state departments in a more
accessible format. The Governor’s Panel indicator work group hoped to seek
synergies with other indicator initiatives, including partnership via an envisioned
state sustainability innovations institute.
The Governor’s Panel contained a communications work group, with a goal of
distributing the report to 100 key decision-makers in the state, in addition to holding
as many one-on-one meetings as possible and to speak to community groups in order
to create a groundswell of public interest or political pressure. This communications
plan included distribution to groups not normally associated with sustainability, such
15
See footnote no. 13.
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M. Holden
as the League of Women Voters, in hopes that these groups might recognize the
report’s agenda as one that also serves group interests.16
The Cascadia Scorecard communications strategy began with selection of a target
audience of 40 major media outlets in the Cascadia bioregion, along with the
identification of a set of opinion leaders, or “people whose ideas and words
galvanize views” in the region. Williams-Derry refers to the process of selecting the
audience as “a power-mapping exercise.”17 Through these two target audiences,
NEW hopes to reach the newspapers read by a wide array of citizens and consumers
and the minds of the region’s most influential thinkers. This focused outreach
method ensures that NEW is ‘preaching’ to those in positions to make change who
are not already in the ‘choir’ and so garnering new points of power and influence for
furthering their sustainability work. In conjunction with other work, NEW also hopes
to be able to tie the indicator results to policy research suggesting specific ‘catalytic
reforms’ for worsening indicator trends. ‘Catalytic reforms’ is a term crafted by
NEW to refer to “high-leverage changes to policy and practice that could redirect
business as usual to more sustainable ends.”18 With opinion leadership status to
ensure that leaders turn to the organization for information on major policy trends,
and with research efforts to be in a position to make suggestions about policy
alternatives, NEW stands to gain considerable power as an organization and for the
information that it collects and publishes.
The Differential Appeal of Seattle Area Indicator Project Models
Community indicator projects in the Seattle area have taken off from the original
innovation of S2 within different government bodies as well as in another
nongovernment group, demonstrating generational iterations of features related to
organizing the project, selecting the indicators, and putting the indicators to use. This
situation, and the direct and indirect ties from S2 to these newer indicator projects,
constitute the local legacy of S2. In order to determine how this situation has arisen,
we need to investigate reasons for the spread of these various indicator projects
throughout Seattle. This section examines the appeal held by indicator projects for
different groups of policy actors and indicator users active in the Seattle area:
opinion and government leaders, government employees, the public, civil society
and media, and private business. Examining the appeal and drawbacks of indicator
projects (Table 3), and the Sustainable Seattle model in particular, to each of these
key groups also reveals potential limits to the further diffusion of indicator-based
approaches to local quality of life and sustainability policy.
16
Lynn Helbrecht, Department of Ecology, interviews 12 April 2002 and 19 June 2003.
17
See footnote no. 13.
18
Quotation excerpted from the organization’s website at: www.northwestwatch.org/topics/measuring.
html. Examples of catalytic reforms include compact urban development, pay-by-the-mile auto insurance,
and tax shifting.
Revisiting the local impact of community indicators projects
267
Table 3 The appeal and drawbacks of indicator projects from different policy perspectives
Indicators user
group
Appeal
Drawbacks
Opinion and
government
leaders
Lend well to the validation
of a wide variety of agendas
Encourage intergovernmental
cooperation
Can reveal and compel action
on negative trends
Can showcase positive trends
for building prestige and
recognition
Government projects
are tied into policy process
with good chance for impact
Allow agencies to
interact with purpose
Different interpretations of the same
data can stymie debate
Support is often insufficient for long-term
project funding
Government
employees
Public/civil
society/media
Businesses
Support long-term
visioning and planning
Can present a sense of urgency
to motivate media and public
pressure for change
Data equally compelling to
scientists and journalists
Can powerfully challenge
common assumptions about
trends e. g. GDP
Compel government
accountability
Lend themselves well to marketing
and fundraising efforts
Government projects do not command
the same legitimacy as NGO-created
May represent simple repackaging of
existing efforts rather than new programs
May represent new layer of bureaucratic
evaluation rather than resources for more
services
Lack of awareness among the public due
to insufficient marketing and publicity
Actual measures often do not adequately
excite readers or reveal trends
Responsibility for action on trends and
alternatives is often unclear
Appeal to Opinion and Government Leaders
For opinion leaders and elected officials in the Seattle area, indicator projects have a
distinct appeal. They provide data that can legitimize and ‘validate’ a wide variety of
previously-held positions, improving the quality of policy debate. S2 operated with
the intent of maintaining political neutrality and succeeded in gaining credibility as a
group whose mission was primarily fact-finding for the public benefit. This
neutrality made the group’s efforts attractive to government agencies. King County
Executive Sims describes S2 as a politically-neutral ‘validator’:
Sustainable Seattle is credible, which helps a lot. It is not seen as being captive by
any body. You know: here are the reports, can you refute them? And the reports
measure what people see, feel, hear, or are thinking about. So . . . it was natural.
And you need validation. When government puts out a report, people just kind of
think it’s our self-interest. When you have a nonprofit that is a reputable nonprofit
issuing the report, it gets credence with the press and with the citizens in the area.
So it was a merger of our mutual interests: our desire to have a sustainable
community, our desire to have a comprehensive plan for the region. We wanted it
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M. Holden
to work, we wanted people to feel comfortable with our strategies, and so
Sustainable Seattle was a validator. That’s what that really was.19
S2’s involvement with the King County Benchmarks project leant this latter
project credibility and neutrality, resulting in a product that interested conservative
and liberal politicians alike. Moffitt reflected on one of the most positive outcomes
of the Benchmark program as finally finding “a way in which to track things that
was nonpartisan.” She recalled the satisfaction of releasing the initial report to
support across the local political spectrum: “it was so cool to see the most . . .
conservative republican council member from King County and then very liberal
democrat . . . who was chair of the Seattle City Hall, jumping up and down when
this report came out.” The report did not guarantee consensus across ideological
divides on how to manage growth and development in the region, but it provided a
set of information based on which “at least we could start the conversation.”20
For Communities Count, ‘starting the conversation’ between city and county
governments about social and health issues has been a major positive outcome of the
project. Although King County has clearly taken the lead on Communities Count,
Seattle Mayor Nickels was a supporter of the project in his previous post as county
council member. As chair of the county council’s Human Services Committee,
Nickels organized a series of regional forums around several of the 2000 report’s key
topics, inviting members of the steering group to participate.21 At the 2002 release
event, Nickels spoke in support of the project by recalling his use of the report’s data
for the public budget hearings (King County News Release 2002). This marked a
change from the 2000 report release, which Sims also attended but which Seattle’s
then-Mayor Schell did not.
Mayor Nickels has shown support for several of the city’s indicator projects. This
is in spite of Nickels’ reputation as a much more conservative mayor than the city
has had in past decades (Young and McOmber 2003; Brunner 2003). DoIT’s first
full indicator report was released at a public event in conjunction with the
announcement of the year’s recipients of technology matching fund grants. Mayor
Nickels, new to office since the project’s initiation, wrote a letter of introduction to
the report and spoke at the launch citing data from the report, a good initial sign of
support. Keyes later received unsolicited comments that policy makers recognize
“the information that we’re giving here is really valuable for [the mayor] and for
other departments in terms of planning, programming and delivering city services
effectively.”22
NEW’s experience shows that the interest of opinion leaders in indicator projects
is growing. NEW gauges the appeal of its projects to opinion leaders by the response
to a series of specially-targeted update e-mails the organization has been sending out
to opinion leaders. These e-mail updates have had a 25% response rate, although
19
See footnote no. 3.
20
See footnote no. 4.
21
See footnote no. 6.
22
See footnote no. 10.
Revisiting the local impact of community indicators projects
269
they contain no specific request for feedback. Most responses are brief accolades for
the work and expressions of interest in hearing more about the project.23
The inclusion of both negative and positive trends in indicator projects is
important to bring needed attention to conditions that are deteriorating. The positive
trends highlighted in indicator reports, on the other hand, provide leaders with
‘bragging rights’ that can lend pride and public recognition to places and catalyze
projects that build on existing strengths. At the Earth Day 2002 release of the
Environmental Action Agenda, for example, Mayor Nickels highlighted the
importance of continuing efforts toward innovation in pollution reduction, irrigation
systems, pesticide and paper use reduction, environmental justice and other issues,
even given the city’s present economic challenges: “We’re already recognized
nationally and internationally as a leader in environmental stewardship . . . This
community has a proud history of stepping up to environmental challenges, and
turning them into opportunities. This agenda builds on those accomplishments, and
keeps us moving forward” (Nickels 2002). As another case in point, the Governor’s
Sustainability Panel was motivated by Governor Locke’s need to prepare a speech
for acceptance of a state sustainability award from the Resource Renewal Institute.
Indicator projects also carry specific drawbacks for leaders. From a perspective of
participatory democracy, contributing indicators to policy debate is only useful if the
data somehow improve the democratic quality of the debate, whether by including
more people, including people more productively, or advancing the debate toward
consensus. In Seattle, where indicator data have been used with equal fervor by both
sides of a policy debate without increasing the level or quality of understanding
between people, this potential value is lost. The Comprehensive Plan indicator
project has faced such challenges, with its results leading different readers to
opposite conclusions. In one policy debate over development proposals for the South
Lake Union neighborhood, council members and citizen groups opposing growth in
the neighborhood used the 2003 report’s growth indicators to argue that city
resources should be directed to other neighborhoods. Other council members and
developers who support growth in South Lake Union used the same data to argue
that the neighborhood’s growth supports the mayor’s proposed further investment in
urban development there. Lish Whitson, the planner in charge of the Comprehensive
Plan indicator project, admits that neither side of the debate has an exclusive claim to
the ‘truth’ of the matter: “They are both legitimate decisions from the same data.” In
this case, the indicators do not seem to help move the debate beyond political
deadlock. When asked which alternative his office supported, Whitson responded
that the data play no role in his department’s position: “we work for the mayor’s
office and his decision is that he wants to put attention into focusing more growth [in
South Lake Union].”24
A further limitation to the appeal of indicator projects to leaders is that support
tends to fall short of full financial backing over the long term. To fund the
Benchmarks program, for example, Moffitt explains: “I literally had to go to the
23
24
See footnote no. 12.
Lish Whitson, Land Use Planner, Department of Design, Construction and Land Use, interview 25
June 2003.
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M. Holden
State. And the State gave me a grant because they thought this was so important.”25
The program proved impressive, earning a State award and motivating similar
projects in other counties, based on advice from Moffitt. Moffitt has since passed the
Benchmarks program on to a colleague who dedicates approximately one-quarter of
a full-time position to updating the annual reports. With cuts to programs throughout
King County, the Benchmarks program remains vulnerable to funding and staff cuts.
Communities Count, for another example, has received significant in-kind
support from the city and county. This support has come in particular from City
Council member Richard Conlin who has emphasized the relevance and importance
of Communities Count to the Growth Management Policy Council. In 2000, the
GMPC passed an unfunded resolution recognizing the utility of Communities Count
and calling for the report to be updated and submitted to the GMPC every two years
(King County GMPC 2000). Most of King County’s support for Communities Count
is in the form of time and expertise from employees who manage the project. The
County Executive’s expressed wishes for the Communities Count report to be
produced annually rather than biannually ring hollow in the ears of the steering
group, as an unfunded mandate.
The project’s continuance depends on the commitment of its steering group and
the success of external funding searches. Ciske has attributed the existence of an
updated report to “the sheer will and support of the people involved around the table
and our willingness to . . . put in the work to find the funds.”26 Moreover, the
Communities Count group’s success in leveraging funding from a variety of sources
has made it the envy of other projects. This suggests an additional appeal of
indicator projects from a programmatic perspective: improving the ability of
government agencies to seek and leverage funding and to explore new partnership
funding mechanisms.
Appeal to Government Employees
Indicator projects housed within government and staffed by government employees
demonstrated appeal and drawbacks. These projects include those in second and
third generations as well as the OSE Environmental Action Agenda. The most oftencited value is their institutionalization within the policy process, improving their
chances of direct impact on policy decisions. In the case of Seattle and King County
projects, another appeal is that projects have contributed to interactions among
departments, improving interdepartmental communication as well as understanding
of the interrelated purposes of their work.
OSE Director and S2 co-founder Steve Nicholas believes that the major local
impact of S2 resides primarily in local government: “the local government sector is
the sector in which the ideas, the concepts, the philosophy, the mindset if you will,
that S2 was and still is trying to promote . . . is the sector in which it’s been most
successful, by far.” This is reflected, to Nicholas, in the name recognition that S2
commands still among city employees compared to the number of citizens that
25
See footnote no. 4.
26
See footnote no. 6.
Revisiting the local impact of community indicators projects
271
recognize the name; the outcome amounts to a “conceptual or impressionistic . . .
imprint on city government.”27 Somewhat different is the impression held by S2 cofounder Alan AtKisson that S2’s legitimacy came as the result of a “ping-pong
effect” in which recognition from other nongovernment groups and government
groups outside the city led to recognition inside the city and vice versa.28
Even with strong support from elected leaders, acceptance of the value of
indicator reports within the rank and file of Seattle and King County government has
been neither easy nor obvious. In fact, government employees within Seattle and
King County are indicator projects’ harshest critics. Their critiques of the
contribution of indicator efforts stem from questions about the projects’ legitimacy
and ability to take a critical stance and about the effectiveness of allocating scarce
resources to indicator projects. To some employees of Seattle and King County
government, indicator projects are mere repackaging of efforts already underway,
rather than new approaches to understanding and approaching problems. Projects are
seen by some to provide more elaborate ways to evaluate employees’ shortcomings
at the cost of providing more resources to improve service delivery and work toward
sustainable development.
In the late 1990s, while encouraging the use of King County Benchmarks within
government, Moffitt encountered strong resistance. Her initial intent was for all
county departments to develop and monitor individual indicators selected from the
Benchmarks report. She found that this was an impossible task: “the cultural change,
acceptance of indicators just wasn’t there.”29 Departmental staff were concerned that
the focus on indicators would take away from their own objectives and worried
about this new threat to their accustomed way of being evaluated in their jobs.
Speaking about this experience, Moffitt said:
. . . it’s very interesting that to me, working within government, a lot of people
don’t see the value of indicators . . . It’s just a cultural change that we have to
make, that we haven’t made . . . A lot of people think: ‘Well, if I’m just doing a
good job, what does it matter whether we track it and give it an A,B,C?.’ . . so
they don’t use this work.30
This statement suggests that more effort is required to convince government
employees of the utility of indicators. In 2002, Moffitt began to see glimmers of
change in this direction. Moffitt hopes that more cities in King County will follow
the lead of Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond, in developing their own growth
management indicator programs, and welcomes the “friendly rivalry” she sees
developing between those cities that are developing them. DoIT has seen its
indicator project encourage collaborative work with King County and the Seattle
Human Services Department on improving the access of nonprofits to technology
and work with the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods to organize neighborhood
leadership training sessions in response to DoIT survey results. In implementing the
27
Steve Nicholas, S2 Co-founder and Director, OSE, interview 20 March 2002.
28
Alan AtKisson, S2 Co-founder, interview 25 November 2003.
29
See footnote no. 4.
30
See footnote no. 4.
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M. Holden
OSE Environmental Action Agenda, as well, Nicholas aims to stimulate increasing
cultural acceptance of the value of indicators by working with other city departments
to help them develop indicator sets for which they will be individually responsible.
Even with these efforts, Nicholas has little hope that the OSE indicator set could
become as compelling as that of S2, because it lacks the same grassroots base: “[S2’s
indicators] were developed in a much more participatory way. Ours are mostly
internally-generated.” Lynn Helbrecht, one of the Governor’s Sustainable Washington Panel facilitators, believes that a partnership with a nonprofit organization for
the state indicator set is essential for legitimacy: “For an agency to do indicators that
reflect its own performance on its own responsibilities is a question of vested
interest. It isn’t that we knowingly twist the numbers . . . but still, I think for such a
program to be legitimate, it really needs to be a partnership with a non-profit.”31
Appeal to the Public, Civil Society, Media and Business Leaders
To those indicator report users who are not in government, and to nongovernment
civil society groups contributing to indicator project work, such as the Cascadia
Scorecard and the Governor’s Sustainability Panel indicator project, the reports
again have distinct appeal and drawbacks. Indicator projects can appeal to the public
because the data tend to support visioning and long-term planning processes, which
seldom are given adequate attention by governments more interested in short-term
political objectives. The Governor’s Panel work group on sustainability indicators is
a case in point. At a quarterly public meeting held in Bellingham in June 2003,
panelists were impressed by the level of engagement and interest among members of
the public in attendance. Panelists had expected the public to raise concerns about
the high ambitions and lofty vision of the Governor’s Sustainability Report. Instead,
members of the public spoke up about the panel’s blind spots with regard to
unmentioned critical sustainability issues such as agriculture. Members of the public
were motivated by the opportunity to think in terms of vision for the long term, what
Helbrecht saw as the key value of the report: “I think what it does is it sets up that
vision, a long-range vision for a 30-year period. And that’s so rare in government,
where thinking is more often oriented around short-term budgets. The most
important thing is to back up and think about the future we want and people are
motivated by that.”32
Because projects can reveal trends in need of urgent attention, they are attractive
to the media as a potential source of sensational stories, and to the public, who may
also seize evidence of an urgent trend to put public pressure on policy makers. NEW
released initial data on sprawl in major news outlets in Portland, Seattle and
Vancouver, reaching 10 million readers, which Durning called “by far the most
successful outreach campaign we’ve ever done.”33 NEW was again overwhelmed by
the media response to its initial data on gasoline consumption and economic security,
31
See footnote no. 16.
32
See footnote no. 16.
33
See footnote no. 12.
Revisiting the local impact of community indicators projects
273
which the organization expected would be less appealing than the sprawl indicator.
Measured trends can be instrumental in motivating policy change toward
sustainability by adding a sense of urgency to conditions.
Businesses find the capacity of indicator projects to define and clarify the
implementation of public policies appealing in the way they hold governments
accountable for stated policy intent. Somewhat surprisingly for Moffitt, support for
the King County benchmarks program has been quicker to come from the private
sector housing development industry than it has from local government. Many of
those in the industry were wary that growth management legislation would allow
government officials to stymie growth altogether or to direct growth arbitrarily
toward their pet projects. Rather than risk this, the private sector was one of the main
bodies to demand indicators to ensure the tracking of growth and development and
to ensure that permitting is unbiased and nonpartisan within the urban growth area.34
Indicator projects have the potential to report data in ways that are equally
compelling to scientists who understand what was done to compile the data and
journalists and members of the public who understand a compelling story. Both the
creation and the use of indicator projects by the public and civil society groups have
the potential to challenge commonly-held beliefs with powerful, data-driven
arguments. In this context, one of Durning’s main goals for the NEW Cascadia
Scorecard project has been to present sufficient data and analyses to severely
undermine the legitimacy of reports on Gross Domestic Product. The NEW project
intends to shake up people’s conception of what is valuable in the Cascadia
bioregion sufficiently that, by the end of five years, “people chuckle or raise their
eyebrows when they hear the report of GDP growth, and say: ‘Oh, that’s quaint,
they’re still reporting that?’”35
Moreover, indicators often lend themselves to use by businesses and nonprofit
groups for marketing and grant development. For example, the Citizens’ Communication Technology Advisory Board now uses the DoIT indicator report for its
intended purpose: to set priorities for disbursement of technology matching funds
according to neighborhood need. Building on publicity through city documents and
independent conference presentations, the DoIT work has also attracted the attention
of a nongovernment group in Maine and a civil society network called the Global
Cities Dialogue.36 In addition, several local organizations and firms have been able
to use report data to further specific goals. The Seattle Community Technology
Alliance has begun to use the report to assess and better direct its outreach efforts
34
The Benchmarks program and the Growth Management Act as a whole have faced their greatest obstacle
from a coalition of churches and schools led by he Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle, arguing that size limits
on new developments outside the urban growth boundary is religious discrimination (Dudley 2000). King
County weathered this obstacle by putting a restatement of its commitment to religious freedom on the
November 2001 ballot, which passed easily, along with a development moratorium pending further study
(Pryne 2001).
35
See footnote no. 12.
The international Global Cities Dialogue is “a worldwide network of cities . . . interested in creating an
information society free of digital divide and based on sustainable development.” The Global Cities
Dialogue is attempting to begin an international conversation about the possibility of developing
information technology indicators for cities worldwide. Information can be found on the organization’s
website: http://www.globalcitiesdialogue.org/.
36
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M. Holden
and to improve funding proposals. A joint ‘ethno-med’ project of Haborview
Hospital and the University of Washington has found the report’s data on access to
the internet among immigrants and non-English speakers useful for a grant proposal.
The Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center has used data on Internet access among
populations most susceptible to breast cancer in order to guide its efforts in an online breast cancer prevention strategy. Finally, the internet software company Real
Networks and a local commercial television station have used the report’s data on
people’s broadband internet access across the city to focus marketing strategies.37
On the other hand, the appeal of indicators to the public has been lacking in
Seattle since the majority of Seattle residents remained incognizant of the projects.
Moffitt’s goal for the Benchmarks program was for it to be used extensively by
citizens and community groups as well as different departments within government.
While some private local high schools have used the reports, Moffitt faults her
limited marketing budget for the scant usage to date: “it’s just a tremendous amount
of staffing and time to get people really engaged and reading [the reports] and
evaluating them.” Moffitt laments the lack of awareness of the program among the
general public: “people in the know, know this is really important, but the general
public doesn’t know it at all. The general public doesn’t even know we have an
Urban Growth Boundary line.”38 This is a problem that can be remedied, at least in
part, by greater attempts at marketing and publicizing indicator reports, as is
happening already in the fourth generation reports.
Another aspect of the lack of public awareness of indicator projects lies in the
selection of the indicators themselves. The problem of finding useful, trackable, and
compelling measures for every dimension of an indicator report has plagued every
indicator project in the region. There is an art and science to indicator selection and
refinement; projects like the Cascadia Scorecard hope to move this development
forward. Finally, at the same time as reporting on indicators can galvanize citizens
and civil society groups to demand policy change, the proper loci for directing
public outrage and the best policy alternatives are often unclear. Parties responsible
for changing negative trends and what policies and behaviours will change them are
not always even knowable.
Conclusion
This article has assessed the local legacy of Sustainable Seattle’s indicator project
through examining the development of indicator projects that followed S2’s early
efforts with some relationship to S2. S2 has spurred ahead and helped to shape local
indicator projects in the Seattle area, through direct contracted support in some
cases, advisory consultation in others, and simply as a local point of reference for
others. This result belies the common belief among those closest to S2 that the
project’s effects have not been felt in the project’s home region.
37
See footnote no. 10.
38
See footnote no. 4.
Revisiting the local impact of community indicators projects
275
The experience of Seattle shows that indicator projects can be effective tools to
encourage attention to community quality-of-life issues because they have wide
appeal to different policy actors. Second generation projects demonstrate the value of
tying indicator projects, situated within government, directly to plans and policy. Third
generation projects have made inroads into extensive community engagement processes
and have brought nontraditional indicators from public health and information
technology fields into consideration. Fourth generation projects in particular demonstrate the nonpartisan appeal of indicators outside local government amongst the public
and business leaders. Northwest Environment Watch and the Governor’s Panel have
experienced broad and better-than-expected support from the public, demonstrating that
cultural shift toward greater acceptance of indicators may be occurring.
Acceptance and institutionalization is a type of policy effect with potential
benefits for the continuance and effectiveness of a set of ideas such as those that
motivate community indicator projects. Indicator projects demonstrate appeal to a
wide range of policy actor groups, from elected leaders in need of validation to
citizens interested in engaging more effectively in policy debate to businesses
seeking better information about public preferences and conditions for marketing
and development. Indicator projects also have drawbacks for particular policy actor
groups, and notably in the case of Seattle, among local government employees, on
whom a great deal of the work of producing and using indicator projects is put. An
additional danger is that part of the wide appeal of indicator projects is that their
results can be used to defend diametrically opposed views. Careful attention should
be paid in the future to the impact of indicator projects on different policy actor
groups and on the quality of local debate on status and trends in quality of life.
Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the financial assistance of the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada for the research that led to this article and the comments provided
by the journal’s reviewers.
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