Home About IEF Conferences Newsletter Resources  INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENT FORUM 14th ANNUAL CONFERENCE

In our society only the visible counts. Only material and easily quantifiable values are measured, and when it comes to decision-making only what can be measured is appreciated, thereby strengthening a society that is based on market values and continuous economic growth, marginalizing environmental and social values. This is a significant challenge for those who consider real yet difficult to measure things such as the beauty of nature or intangible things like spiritual values to be essential aspects of life.

For the past two years an EU-funded research project on values-based indicators of education for sustainable development (ESDinds) has worked on how to make these invisible, ethical and spiritual values visible by, for example, developing indicators to measure trust, integrity, justice, empowerment, unity in diversity, and care and respect for the community of life in businesses and civil society organizations.

The 14th Annual Conference of the International Environment Forum is being combined with the international scientific conference that presents results of the ESDinds project. The project has exciting results to share on the development of values-based indicators, tested in the field with civil society organizations and businesses, and, remotely, by 50 other organizations, some of whom will report at the conference (see more below). The conference seeks to bring together workers in the different but overlapping fields of indicators, sustainability and values, with the hope that a new "community of practice" will emerge from these interactions. A web site for this has just been launched at http://www.wevalue.org.

The Conference is organized around four overlapping themes:

Values - The relevance of values to the success of businesses, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and other organizations, even when they are not themselves values-based, is becoming increasingly recognized, and a theme of the conference will be the usefulness of values-based indicators in that context.

Useful indicators for CSO projects - The development of useful indicators of any type for civil society (CSO) projects have always been problematic. At this conference speakers from CSOs, funders and researchers will give updates on challenges and emerging ideas.

Co-design and partnership in research - The importance of co-design and the involvement of Communities of Interest for the success and appropriateness of a research project will be explored.

Ethics and Sustainable Development - Major advances have been made in developing indicators, but challenges still exist at the project (or local) level, and in linking to ethical values.

Plenary speakers will include Bedrich Moldan (Czech Republic), Augusto Lopez-Claros (Spain) and Arthur Dahl (Switzerland), who are leading experts on various dimensions of indicators.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION
The conference begins Thursday morning 16 December at 08:30 and concludes Saturday at 12:30. The IEF Annual General Assembly will be held on Friday 17 December at 17:15, after the main conference session. Registration for the conference is now open at http://www.esdinds.eu/, and is free before 1 December 2010. If you are an IEF member please also send a note that you are coming to ief@iefworld.org. Information on accommodation and location is also provided in the web site. Brighton is easily reached by train from London Gatwick airport. Contributions of posters, short informal talks and formal talks relevant to the conference theme are welcome. See the invitation on the web site. The IEF is contributing some plenary speakers and will organize one or more parallel sessions during the conference. If you are interested in making a presentation to an IEF session, please send your proposal to ief@iefworld.org. There will also be an electronic version of the conference for IEF members as usual.

Early Results from the ESDinds project

While there is still a further testing phase to be completed, it is already clear that the ESDinds project has succeeded in developing indicators to measure trust, integrity, justice, empowerment, unity in diversity, and care and respect for the community of life in businesses and civil society organizations. It has found processes to help organizations crystallize their understanding of their values, identify general indicators that express those values, define specific indicators or proxy measures that represent the implementation of those values, and measure those indicators quantitatively or qualitatively. This can be done in ways that are internally consistent, and has already produced useful results in evaluating the impact of projects which have values-based elements. The methodology has already been used successfully with an Earth Charter project for indigenous school children in Mexico, a Red Cross project for former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, a Mexican university, the Lush cosmetics company in Italy and a small Peoples Theater in Germany, and will soon be tested in China, with a financial services company in Luxembourg, and opened to trials by 50-80 other civil society organizations. By December there should be a considerable body of practical experience on values-based indicators to discuss. More details on the ESDinds project can be found at http://www.brighton.ac.uk/sdecu/research/esdinds.