About the ESDinds Project

ESDinds (Development of Indicators & Assessment Tools for CSO Projects Promoting Values-based Education for Sustainable Development) is a two year collaborative research project, running from January 2009 to January 2011, supported by the European Commission under its Seventh Framework Programme.

The goal of the ESDinds project is for Research Organisations (RTDs) and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) to work together to develop useful value-based indicators to be used in Education for Sustainable Development projects.

In consultation with the CSOs, researchers have been developing indicators relevant to their projects, combining the on-the-ground knowledge of the CSOs with their knowledge of academic and national level indicators. The project will be completed in several phases:


Expected outcomes

The primary expected outcome of the ESDinds initiative is the development of a replicable process, applicable in a wide range of national, cultural and organizational contexts, for CSOs to create indicators and assessment tools to measure the values dimensions of their sustainability projects.

Additionally, by linking the ESDinds findings about the significance of ethical values in sustainability to the academic and policy literature on sustainable development, the project will contribute to a deeper conceptualization of the process of individual and social transformation towards sustainability.

Furthermore, by linking the value-based indicators and assessment tools developed through ESDinds to the academic literature on measuring values, it may be possible to project wider social, organizational and individual impacts linked to the values we will have examined.

Finally, the initiative will contribute lessons about research design involving collaborative inquiry between CSOs and universities.

Project Achievements

The ESDinds project has succeeded in developing indicators to measure and evaluate values-related processes and outcomes in organisations, projects and groups. These indicators were originally related to the values trust, integrity, justice, empowerment, unity in diversity, and care and respect for the community of life but mesuring indicators only really makes sense when those values are defined in a local context.

The project has found processes to help organizations crystallize their understanding of their values, identify general indicators that express those values, define specific indicators or proxy measures that represent the implementation of those values, and measure those indicators quantitatively or qualitatively. This can be done in ways that are internally consistent, and produce useful results in evaluating the impact of projects on values.

The methodology has already been used successfully with eleven projects: an Earth Charter project for indigenous school children in Mexico, a Red Cross project for former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, a Mexican university, the Lush cosmetics company in Italy and Peoples Theater in Germany among others. We also now have over 100 organisations signed up to the WeValue community. To view summaries of key field visits, visit the Docments page.
.