Tracking the sustainable development of WAC programs using sustainability indicators: Limitations and possibilities

Related Publications

Published a year after Sustainable WAC (2018), Michelle Cox and Jeffrey Galin set out to clarify and further refine what has proven the book’s biggest “stumbling block” (p. 39): sustainability indicators (SIs). In this article, Cox and Galin claim that while SIs provide a useful heuristic for all WAC program leaders, they may not require assessment until later in a WAC program’s history. Further, they clarify the following aspects of the use of SIs: the identification of “proto-SIs” during the Understand stage, the process of working with a group of stakeholders to identify and assess SIs, and the use of the Drive-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) heuristic, which we had formerly discussed for creating SIs but have come to understand as a useful heuristic later in the process of WAC program development. Throughout the article, they draw on their own experiences using the WSA as program directors. This article would be fruitful to read alongside Peters (2019) and Galin (2021).