Reflections on what sustainability assessment can and cannot do

Sustainable development is both an appealing and bewildering policy concept. For sustainable development to be a practical decision-making strategy for public policy-makers, practical and user-friendly support processes need to be developed. Participation, as one of the central principles of sustainable development, has a key role to play in policy for sustainable development for both normative (democratic) and practical (source of knowledge) reasons. Due to their proximity to citizens and their key role in policy implementation, sub-national entities are promising forums for innovative participatory policy instruments. Based on recent researche experience in the Flemish Region of Belgium and in South Africa's Limpopo Province, recent public policy initiatives for sustainable development have triggered interest for innovative sustainability assessment approaches. In both cases, a tailor-made ‘sustainability assessment focus group’ approach was developed and applied on a regional policy strategy as a pilot exercise. These participatory sustainability assessment exercises were interesting examples of social learning on the way towards ecological democracy in different cultural and geographic settings, yet they also highlighted the limitations of sustainability assessment. The importance of the discursive and institutional dynamics in which assessments are performed should not be underestimated, and this realization contributes to a better understanding of these exercises