How to Measure the Impact of Citizen Initiatives on Urban Sustainability?

Abstract

Citizen initiatives (CIs) arise in response to various issues felt by the community that undoubtedly have an impact on their quality of life, and are materialised through innovative practices at different levels of society. The contribution of CIs in the transition towards sustainable cities is a topic of growing interest. The dynamics of social processes merit monitoring, reflection and analysis, to understand and harness the potential of CIs to generate improvements in community sustainability and robust and reliable systems to reaffirm and enhance their value, but the question arises: How can they be evaluated? Initial evaluation methodologies exist, with the aim of measuring the real impact of these, although their application is scarce. This review article aims to analyse existing evaluation methodologies that measure the impact of CIs in different fields, through an analysis of the main characteristics of three existing sustainability evaluation systems in CIs. Its methodology and results are investigated, using the SALSA framework, which organizes the review process into Search, AppraisaL, Synthesis, and Analysis. As a result, a catalogue of possible improvements to be implemented in order to create more homogeneous and multidisciplinary evaluation systems is created. It is concluded that today, the existing systems are a methodological framework to be developed and improved in order to generate systems that transversally and holistically evaluate the CIs and its importance in the transformation of society.