Sustainable Tourism Law

A LEGAL APPROACH TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INDICATORS 749 of future generations in situations that may have become very different (Stiglitz et al., 2009). As explained above, a forward-looking indicators are required in order to reflect that precautionary approaches need to be at the core of policies for sustainable development. It is important toachieveanewperspectiveonthe science–policycommunication as a way to face the growing complexities created by the fundamental uncertainties of critical environmental problems and the inadequacy of scientific as well as political institutions in responding to these problems (Garnåsjordet, 2012). In other words, researches must take into account not only the relationships between facts and values, the possibility of catastrophic decision-stakes, the legitimate plurality of conflicting interests and ethical complexities but also the involvement and participation of stakeholders and citizens as a way to improve the quality of the policy deliberations. Under this complexity and uncertainty, measuring sustainability may become a huge challenge since it is quite different from standard statistical practice. In fact, in this case we need not only projections of technological or environmental trends, but also projections of how they will interact with socio-economic or even political forces. It is also required a much broader set of expertise and under this context, path dependence is a challenge for SDI development since it is necessary not only to foresee how resilient the sustainable path is, but also how resilient the unsustainable paths are. Under this issue, any sustainability indicator must fulfil some properties (Garnåsjordet, 2012): (i) it must be able to show changes over time. In other words, it must address not only its historic development but also its possible continuation into the future allowing the so called “early warnings” of emerging threats to sustainability making possible to fully evaluate the usefulness of the indicator for the assessment of whether society is on its way toward a sustainable development path; (ii) careful selection of measurement scale is essential. Although absolute changes in variables may provide easy interpretations in cases where the indicator may be directly linked to fundamental responses to processes in physical or environmental systems, relative changes may be the most relevant way of presenting changes in indicators over time. (iii) it is important to be aware of possible confusion when dealing with different types of change when there is correlation between the variables;