Governing and assessing sustainability within public organizations

INERIS is a member of the sustainable development Club of public institutions and firms which currently has over 60 members. These considerations led to the development of a best practices guide for SD following the recommendations of ISO 26000 on Societal Responsibility of Organizations. On April 15, 2010, member institutions of the Club have confirmed the needs of a common reflection on the SD governance. INERIS was mandated by the General Commissioner for Sustainable Development for working on governance modes. In daily practice, all public organizations are facing the complexity of managing balance between social, environ mental and economic dimensions. This paper will therefore, identify the challenges of managing these balances. This will need to work on how to improve performances which are based on bath policy makers at the highest level of organizations as well as operational decisions regarding sustainable development. It is in this context that we address the issue of dashboards and indicators. These are used in many areas to make a synthetic knowledge and appropriate for a decision, the question of the adequacy of such tools in the context of sustainable development is raised here. The goal of this paper is to answer the following questions: - To what extent sustainable development indicators' can improve decision making processes and therefore the sustainability of public organizations? - ln what contexts is it appropriate to use the indicators and in what ether contexts it wouId be, however, inappropriate to use because of possible simplifications they generate ? - For contexts deemed irrelevant to the use of indicators, what ether approaches, technical or organizational, would be relevant to improve the representations are. the makers of the sustainable development level of a public organization