The Pathway to Sustainable Development
The Bellagio Principles Provide Guidance For Green Business
Sep 3, 2009
The Bellagio Principles for Assessing Sustainable Development can be used by any business, non-profit organisation or community group to create a strategy to assess progress towards the goal of sustainable development.
What is Sustainable Development
Sustainable development means ensuring that today’s business practices provide for a natural environment that supports future generations; for example ensuring that there are ongoing water supplies.
Similar to corporate social responsibility and triple bottom line, sustainable development focuses on the interplay between society, environment and economy. Diesendorf (2000) suggested that a combination of the Bellagio Principles and the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion would create an easily implementable framework for sustainable development that values both people and the environment equally.
Bellagio Principles – Guidelines for Assessing Sustainable Development Progress
Ten specific principles comprise the Bellagio Principles; each individual principle focuses on specific guidelines relating to the assessment of sustainable development. The Bellagio Principles are an opportunity for businesses to gain guidance on the best practice in relation to measuring progress towards the goal of sustainable development.
Principle 1 of the Bellagio Principles focuses on setting an overarching feel for the process; all assessment activities should be undertaken with an understanding of the concept of sustainable development.
Bellagio Principles 2 – 5 – What to Assess?
Principles 2 to 6 of the Bellagio Principles focus on developing the assessment criteria for a sustainable development assessment. The following considerations are suggested:
- that the organisation reviews all of its processes (Principle 2)
- assessment should review the three main principles of sustainable development – social, economic and environmental impacts (Principles 2 and 3)
- consider the requirements for the future (Principles 3 and 4)
- ensure that assessment is undertaken over the long term and not just short term (Principle 4)
- measurements should be standardized, compared to industry benchmarks and a limited number of indicators should be used for clarity (Principle 5)
Bellagio Principles 6 – 8 – How to Assess
After documenting the assessment criteria, Bellagio Principles 6 – 8 deal with the physical undertaking of the assessment. Sustainable development assessments are required to be:
- Open, transparent and accessible with freely available methods and data used (Principle 6)
- Able to be understood by stakeholders (Principle 7)
- Participated in by a wide variety of stakeholders (Principle 8)
Bellagio Principles 9 – 10 – Ensuring Ongoing Capacity
The final principles address the need to ensure ongoing capacity for undertaking sustainable development assessment at both an organisational and community level. Principle 9 – Ongoing Assessment – also calls for assessment activities to be flexible and able to adapt to changing trends in sustainability and Principle 10 , which deals with institutional capacity calls for responsibility and support to be given to the assessment process.
The Bellagio Principles assist organisations to work towards achieving sustainable development practices by setting out guidelines for assessment. Sustainable development practices provide for a future for the earth and human beings. The Bellagio Principles can be used as a framework to assess current corporate practices or to implement corporate social responsibility practices in smaller organisations.
Sources
Diesendorf, M. (2000) “Sustainability and Sustainable Development” in Dunphy, D, Benveniste, J, Griffiths, A & Sutton, P Sustainability – The Corporate Challenge of the 21st Century, Allen & Unwin, Australia
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