Exploring critical issues for local sustainability assessment through community participation

Despite several initiatives in local sustainability assessment, there remains a lack of knowledge on how to balance an assessment that considers multiple aspects while also focusing on specific critical issues of local sustainability. The primary goal of this research is to explore how a subset of ‘technical’ and ‘voluntary’ indicators can be co-developed to assess critical local sustainability issues. To this end, a participatory approach was employed with the communities of three local case studies in Brazil where solid waste was a critical issue for local sustainability. The results indicate that the co-developed goals and indicators effectively address critical sustainability issues. They also show that voluntary indicators were able to capture in-depth, context-specific problems and were more user-friendly. Due to these characteristics, we argue that they may be more suitable for citizen monitoring. Overall, this study highlights that technical and voluntary indicators developed through community participation enhance their relevance and usability for local sustainability assessments. • Standardized indicator sets fail to capture the concerns of local communities. • Voluntary indicators scored higher than technical ones in all three case studies. • Community members preferred indicators aligned with their everyday experiences. • Critical local sustainability issues require more in-depth indicator sets.