This paper argues that the need for a core “fourth pillar” of sustainability/sustainable development, as demanded in multiple arenas, can no longer be ignored on the grounds of intangibility. Different approaches to this vital but missing pillar (cultural-aesthetic, religious-spiritual, and political-institutional) find common ground in the area of ethical values. While values and aspects based on them are widely assumed to be intangible and immeasurable, we illustrate that it is possible to operationalize them in terms of measurable indicators when they are intersubjectively conceptualized within clearly defined practical contexts. The processes require contextual localization of items, which can nonetheless fit into a generalizable framework. This allows useful measurements to be made, and removes barriers to studying, tracking, comparing, evaluating and correlating values-related dimensions of sustainability. It is advocated that those involved in operationalizing sustainability (especially in the context of creating post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals), should explore the potential for developing indicators to capture some of its less tangible aspects, especially those concerned with ethical values.

On 1 January 2016, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development—adopted by world leaders in 2015—came into force. They build on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and call for action by all countries to promote prosperity while protecting the planet. Since the SDGs are not legally binding, governments are expected to take ownership and establish national frameworks for the achievement of the 17 Goals. Countries thus have the primary responsibility for follow-up and review of the progress made in implementing the Goals, which will require quality, accessible and timely data collection. This will be instrumental for both regional and global follow-up analyses and assessments—several such major global assessments have already appeared. It might be supposed that the SDGs framework, including indicators, is conceptually and methodologically well-designed and tested in order to function reliably and provide guidance for such assessments. However, while it seems that the current structure of the SDGs has provided a firm policy framework, the Goals and targets have been mostly operationalized by indicators. We demonstrate and argue that without a procedurally well-designed, conceptual indicator framework for selecting and/or designing indicators, the results of SDGs assessments may be ambiguous and confusing.

Thirty years after “Our Common Future” by the Brundtland Commission in 1987, sustainable development remains the only internationally and consensually recognized global development concept. The last major United Nations event—the Rio+20 Conference in 2012—endorsed it by proposing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their more specific targets and indicators (adopted in 2015). We claim that educators, politicians, and civil society organizations have failed to a large extent in making the sustainable development concept broadly appealing. Among the missing enabling factors are a good narrative (making an extremely complex sustainable development concept comprehensible to all, thereby raising public support), social norms (reflecting commonly held sustainability principles and goals), and sustainability indicators (providing clear information for steering policies as well as for daily decisions). In this paper we focus on the role of mass media (English-written printed newspapers) as an important information channel and agenda-setter, and analyze their modes of sustainability communication. We look into how these media communicate selected key sustainability themes, and how they make connections to the overarching concept of sustainable development. We hypothesize that the media predominantly informs people and sets the agenda by communicating themes of current interest (e.g., gender inequalities), but misses the opportunity of framing them in the broader, overarching concept of sustainable development. This may be a significant sustainability faux (error)—great political intentions need efficient implementation tools, not just political resolutions. To this end, we need well-narrated and framed sustainability themes communicated through mass media to activate the social norms that potentially support societally beneficial conduct. By undertaking an extensive mass media analysis, this paper offers rare empirical evidence on sustainability communication by the global mass media during the last ten years, and identifies the main caveats and challenges for sustainability proponents. As sustainability communication does not yet have its own theoretical framework, SDGs seem to offer a suitable mechanism for this.