Discussing features of social measures important in SLCA impact indicators' selection

There have been several attempts to formalize Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) methodology and make it as robust as the environmental part of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). "Guidelines for SLCA of products" (UNEP/SETAC, 2009) and progressively "The Methodological Sheets for Sub-categories in SLCA" (UNEP/SETAC, 2013) have provided recommendations on how to conduct the first two phases of SLCA (i.e., goal and scope definition and life cycle inventory). The research on the third phase (life-cycle impact assessment) was, at that time, not considered sufficiently mature to be included (Sureau et al. 2017). With S-LCA conceived by the same practitioners who created LCA, it is not surprising that they attempted to model social impacts in the same way it was done for environment alone (Iofrida et al. 2017). Most of the applications take into account values, stakeholders’ perceptions, subjectivities, and participation in an interpretivist way, but often without clarifying the theoretical underpinnings (Iofrida et al. 2017). In the following we attempt to clarify the role of these features of societal measures in the selection of the end-point social impact indicators in SLCA