Revisiting the Local Impact of Community Indicators Projects: Sustainable Seattle as Prophet in Its Own Land

Sustainable Seattle’s Indicators of Sustainable Community project was the first of its kind and remains one of the best known attempts by a community group to measure a wide range of what it values most about local quality of life and sustainability. The great irony in the organization’s notoriety, however, is that S2’s reputation grows with distance from its home in Seattle. National and international recognition has come to S2 much more easily than uptake and implementation of the project, its method, or its recommendations at home in Seattle and King County. This article, based on case study research, provides a closer examination of this received wisdom about the limited local impact of Sustainable Seattle by foregrounding the local legacy of this first generation indicators project in the form of nine different indicator projects that have succeeded the S2 project. All of these projects bear some connection to S2 and can be shown to constitute second, third and fourth generation indicator projects in terms of organizational structure, indicator framework, and approach to mobilizing awareness and policy and behavioural change. This article also offers lessons from indicator projects in the Seattle area about the appeal of an indicators-based approach generally, and the various Seattle models in particular, from the perspective of different key policy actor groups. In sum, the research presented in this article contributes to filling the gap in the community indicators literature with regard to the policy impacts of community indicator projects in their localities and directions for increasing the effectiveness of projects from the perspectives of different indicator organizations and policy actor groups.