Measuring sustainable development in the education area using multi-criteria methods: a case study
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Measuring sustainable development in the education area using multi-criteria methods: a case study Ewa Roszkowska1
· Marzena Filipowicz-Chomko2
© The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Sustainability is a holistic and complex multi-dimensional concept comprising economic, social and environmental issues. The EU Sustainable Development Goals’ indicator set, developed by European Commission, is implemented online in Eurostat’s database and constitutes the basis for assessing the level of sustainability assessment in different areas. The integration of the sustainability indicators was carried out in many studies by using the multi-criteria techniques. This work proposes a new methodological framework based on extended TOPSIS procedure, which takes into account EU targets and/or national targets in building positive ideal solution and negative ideal solution. This algorithm allows compensatory and non-compensatory approach in integrated sustainability assessment from the target point of view. This framework has been applied to measure sustainable development in the area of education in 28 EU countries in 2015. The results of this research also illustrate the complexity of measuring sustainable development, where multiple sustainability criteria and targets are considered. Keywords Sustainable development · Education · Multi-criteria technique · Target · TOPSIS
1 Introduction Sustainable development can be defined simply as improving the quality of life without affecting the environment. Sustainability is a holistic and complex multi-dimensional concept comprising economic, social and environmental issues (United Nations 1992;
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Marzena Filipowicz-Chomko [email protected] Ewa Roszkowska [email protected]
1
University of Bialystok, Warszawska 53, 15-063 Białystok, Poland
2
Bialystok University of Technology, Wiejska 45A, 15-351 Białystok, Poland
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E. Roszkowska, M. Filipowicz-Chomko
Rio Declaration 1992). An extensive overview of sustainability performance evaluation, including literature review and future directions, was provided by Büyüközkan and Karabulut (2018). They suggested that “sustainability performance evaluation models shall be more balanced, suitable criteria and their interrelations shall be well defined and subjectivity of qualitative criteria inherent to sustainability indicators shall be considered”. The sustainability decision context, requires the decision maker to take a position on a concept of “sustainability”. There are two different levels of sustainability: weak and strong (Ayres et al. 2001; Cabeza-Gutes 1996; Dietz and Neumayer 2007; Ekins et al. 2003; Neumayer 2003; Munda 2005a). Weak sustainability states that “human capital” can substitute “natural capital”. Weak sustainability is the idea where the natural capital could be used as long as it is converted into manufactured capital of equal value. In contrary, strong sustainability states that “human capital” and “natural capital” are complementary, but not interchangeable. The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Develop
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