Measuring Sustainable Development: A Brief Discussion - and a view to Agricultural Policies on Certified Organics in a Globalizing Context.

Summary

Economic (GNP) growth has long remained the main-stream measure of national progress. However, com-plex, composite and multi-dimensional development indicators, such as green national accounts and sus-tainability indices, have gained importance. The paper take it´s point of departure in a brief review of these changing measures of development, and present one preliminary conclusion on how far alternative meas-ures has succeded. Further – the paper explores how complex indicators in the field of agriculture have perhaps spilled back into international agricultural policy changes, where conditions existed for challeng-ing the role of (economic or production) growth as the only measure and policy objective. Implicitly therefore a perspective is added speculating that agriculture may be a field where development re-search has further potential to play a role in moving new development measures up government policy agendas.