Recently, I was privileged to be part of an international consultation on Indicators of Sustainable Development. We took these words to mean the task of working out whether or not societies are getting better or worse at both improving the quality of life for their people and looking after Planet Earth.

This, the overall goal of sustainable development, is at the same time particular to various cultures and ecosystems and the same in its essence everywhere. All parts of Planet Earth operate by the same physical and biological laws, though they manifest themselves as different ecosystems. All humans have the same fundamental needs, though their ways of meeting those needs and aspirations are culturally varied. So we need to be aware that, coming from a multiplicity of specific and local indicators, there may exist an overarching set of whole-system indicators that communicate the same meanings and inform common purposes everywhere. The search for that set is one of the most important tasks facing us in what is often described as the global village.

Every human being knows that some of the most important things in life - freedom, love, fear, hope, beauty, harmony, fulfilment, fairness (and even the beauty of objective precision) - are qualities, not quantities. It is important, therefore, to acknowledge inherent subjectivity in all indicators and to respect indicators of quality, however hard they may be to define. If we guide our decisions only by "objective" (quantitative) indicators, we should not be surprised if we produce a world characterised only by its size.

The world economy is doubling roughly every twenty years. The world population is doubling every forty years or so. Rapid growth causes new stresses and brings two old questions together in a new way and on a new scale: How can we design society to provide sufficiency, security, and good lives to all people? (the Development question); and How can we live within the rules and boundaries of the biophysical environment? (the Sustainability question). With the economy globally linked, the ocean fisheries depleting, the atmosphere changing, the open spaces filling in, and much of the world's population still living in poverty and still expanding, these two questions come together with urgency.

"Sustainability" and "development" both have practical connotations, but at base they are value words. What they are about is good lives for all people, in harmony with nature. Like all value words - freedom, fairness, beauty, justice - they are almost impossible to define. Nevertheless it is possible to sense them, and sense their absence, and we must do so because they are vitally important. Taken together as "sustainable development", they become doubly difficult; two values that sometimes seem contradictory but nevertheless must be achieved together.

Sustainability indicators must be more than environmental indicators; they are about time and thresholds. The central question of sustainability is: how long can this activity last? Alternatively, how much time do we have available to do something, before we run into trouble?

Development indicators must be more than growth indicators. Yes, they are about efficiency, but also about sufficiency, equity, and quality of life. Development means creating the most value for people with the least possible impact on nature (efficiency). It means creating enough for everyone (sufficiency), not wild excess for a few. It means meeting material needs materially and non material needs non materially, and meeting all needs and aspirations with elegance and beauty. It emphasises not income but wealth, not the flow of money but the standing stocks of material and social wealth (intact forests, sound housing, productive tools, public trust) that enhance our lives (and that can lead among other things, to flows of money). Ultimately, development indicators must measure not quantity of possessions or of income, but quality of life.

A key point in looking for indicators is to distinguish between stocks and flows. Stocks describe the state of the system - the number of trees in a forest, people in a nation, factories in an economy, money in the bank, water in an aquifer, unpaid debt. Stocks are accumulations of the past history of the system. The sources in nature from which raw material flows are drawn are primarily stocks. So are the sinks into which pollutant flows are poured, and the factories and tools that make up the productive capital of a nation. Stocks are generally the most countable elements of systems, and hence they are obvious indicators. In practice, however, they have little or no place in the construction of key economic indicators such as GDP, which measures money flows. The economist EF Schumacher once pointed out "That which is good and helpful ought to be growing and that which is bad and hindering ought to be diminishing.... We therefore need, above all else... concepts that enable us to choose the right direction of our movement and not merely to measure its speed."

In addressing the limitations of GDP, various groups have sought to define other summary indicators. Some, like the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), are attempts to correct GDP by, for example, subtracting rather than adding the costs of pollution cleanup, and adding rather than ignoring the value of unpaid household work. Others, like the UNDP's Human Development Indicator (HDI), try to create indicators that go beyond money flows (by including, for example, literacy and life expectancy). These attempts are welcome and useful. A corrected GDP is better than an uncollected one, and indicators that expand for attention towards human and ecological factors are steps in the right direction. But they are not enough in themselves, partly because they are static "snapshots", and partly because they are so aggregated as to hide countervailing subtrends.

One valuable response is to extend the definition of capital to natural, human, and social capital. This is an easily understood and powerful concept that could link sustainability and development and provide the dynamic, total-system approach we are looking for. For example, every banker and businessperson knows that development in a monetary sense means increasing your stock of investments, and that sustainability means living from the income from the investments, not eating into the principal. No good accountant would credit as real growth a temporary burst of income that came from the expenditure of capital. It is not difficult to extend that useful idea to "natural capital" - the planetary systems that sustain us. As examples, we should catch fish at no more than the rate at which they regenerate, not consume the breeding population; harvest forests no faster than they can grow back, so that the harvest can continue forever; farm so that soil does not erode faster than it is formed.

The idea of capital - all forms of capital - is central to indicators and information systems for sustainable development. It captures development and sustainability and their relation to each other. It allows the stock-flow analysis that can make indices dynamic. And it begins to suggest a framework that could keep track of the linkages among the many forms of capital. We need indicators that could help people and nations build up all kinds of wealth into a people-enriching, nature-preserving system of sustainable development. Such a framework is the Daly Spectrum (named after the economist who proposed it) which relates natural wealth to ultimate human well-being through technology, economy, politics, and ethics. It allows us to order and see the relationships between natural, economic, human, and social capital.

At the base, supporting everything, are what Daly calls Ultimate Means. These are Natural Capital - the stuff of the planet, the sun's energy, the biogeochemical cycles, the ecosystems and the genetic information they bear, and the human being as an organism. All life and all economic transactions are built upon and sustained by it. The ultimate means were not created by us; they can be seen both as our planetary heritage and as having independent right to sustainable existence. We and all other life forms evolved together and must exist together.

Ultimate means are converted through technology to intermediate means; tools, machines, factories, skilled labour, processed material and energy - built capital and human capital. Intermediate means define the productive capacity of the economy and the immediate goals of development. They are necessary but not sufficient to accomplish all higher purposes. Managing, valuing, distributing, maintaining, and using these intermediate means is the concern of the political economy.

Intermediate Ends are the goals that governments and commerce promise, and economies are expected to deliver as outputs - consumer goods, health, wealth, knowledge, leisure, employment, communication, transportation (Social capital). They are what everyone wants, but they by no means guarantee satisfaction; in societies where they are abundant, people are still full of complaints. That is because the intermediate ends are not ends in themselves, but instruments to achieve something yet more meaningful.

The conversion of Intermediate Ends to Ultimate Ends depends on an effective ethic or religion or philosophy or culture that can answer the question: What are health, wealth, education, and mobility FOR? The Ultimate Ends are the answers to that question; desired for themselves and not as the means to the achievement of any other ends. The words we use for these ends are vague and abstract - well-being, happiness, harmony, fulfilment, self-respect, self-realisation, community, identity, security, creativity, enlightenment, love, grace, bliss. The impossibility of defining or measuring them demonstrates that they are qualities, not quantities; non-material, though they require the whole material structure underneath to support them.

Sustainable development calls us to expand our present economic calculus to include both development (ultimate ends) and sustainability (ultimate means). It would be the goal of a sustainable society to produce the greatest possible ends with the least possible means. To do that the entire framework, from technology through philosophy, must be efficient and balanced. If any stage of the conversion from means to ends is faulty, the functioning of the whole is diminished.

Integration from ultimate means to ultimate ends requires good science and appropriate technology, just and efficient political and economic systems and a culture that illuminates the purposes of life. The focus of a society which follows this framework would be wholeness, not maximising one part of the system at the expense of other parts (or other societies or other species). The currently fashionable goal of perpetual economic growth (intermediate ends) would then be seen as nonsensical, both because the finite material base cannot sustain it and because material growth is not of itself what anyone ultimately wants. The focus of effort would be on quality, not quantity, and yet quantity sufficient for the physical needs of all would not be lacking. With integrity, sustainability, equity, and human fulfilment as the operational goals of the system, quantity would take care of itself.

It is well established for most industrialised nations that efficiency in the design of built capital can produce the same amounts of economic output with half as much, or even one-tenth as much energy and materials. Is it not also likely that efficiency in the design of social capital could produce equivalent well being with one-hundredth or even one-thousandth as much energy, materials, and built capital? This possibility gives one hope that truly sustainable means of meeting the highest and most important ends could be attained for all people on earth. Somewhere within the concept of social capital, combined with clever technical design of built capital and loving development of human capital, is the capacity to meet material needs materially and non-material needs and aspirations non-materially.

What we are searching for are indicators which are leverage points in systems. Their presence or absence, accuracy or inaccuracy, use or non-use can change, for better or worse, the behaviour of the system as a whole. For example, a few years ago when a new US. law required every large plant emitting toxic air pollutants to list those pollutants publicly, so the surrounding communities knew about them, an indicator was inadvertently created. Local newspapers began reporting the "top ten polluters." Companies acted quickly to get off the list, and toxic emissions decreased rapidly though there was no law against them. The presence of the information was sufficient to change the behaviour. (Interestingly, this sort of thing has never happened in NZ; one wonders why)

But if we think social capital is hard to describe, how are we ever going to define human well-being? Not by going around doing shallow polls that ask, simply, "are you happy?"! Think what different answers might come forth if we actually asked, "Does your life allow you to contribute all you have to give to society? If you had complete control of your own time, would you spend it the way you do now? Do you see a purpose to your life and are you able to achieve that purpose? Are you lonely? Are you loved? Do you love others? Is there enough beauty in your life? Joy? Transcendence? If you knew you would die tomorrow, would you be satisfied? What would it take, do you think, to make you satisfied?".

If we cannot define what our ultimate ends are, how can we know when we have achieved them, or whether we are approaching them, or even whether we are going in the right direction? The qualitativeness, subjectiveness, elusiveness, and culture-specificity of these questions does not for a moment diminish the importance of the answers. As present-day inhabitants of a system "driven" by indicators such as GDP, we in NZ should not be surprised when it produces what those indicators do measure - money flow and size of the economy - rather than real well-being.

Most of us will agree that the dominant cultures on earth are mobilising enormous quantities of resources, spewing out insupportable quantities of wastes, building huge capital structures, and not really achieving happiness. Even if that is as much as we can understand, then there is already every good reason to stop using indicators that uncritically count a larger physical economy as "good," and to start organising ourselves around what we know is really important. That means we must integrate the whole framework by assessing the sufficiency, equity, efficiency, and sustainability of the process whereby we use ultimate means to satisfy ultimate ends.

Suppose that we could, by whatever subjective or opinion-survey or poetic means we can imagine, assess the well-being of our society. And suppose we could measure the throughput from nature that is being used to achieve that well-being. Then we would be able to come close to answering the three central questions of sustainable development.

Are the people well-off, satisfied, happy?

Are we achieving the maximum possible well-being with the least possible throughput

of material and energy?

Are the natural systems that supply the throughput healthy, resilient, and full of evolutionary potential?

I and many others believe it is time for us in this country to change direction. Even rough indicators of well-being and of social capital are better than a pretence that they do not exist or that their value is zero!