Book chapter
17. Impact measurement for organizations
Abstract
Impact measurement is a broad and heterogeneous family of methods that aims at measuring the positive and/or negative effects of some phenomenon on a portion of the social or natural, environment, using quantitative and/or qualitative approaches. In this chapter, we present a taxonomy of impact measurement method families and focus on three of the families; namely, (i) ethical, social and environmental accounting, (ii) social impact assessment, and (iii) life-cycle assessment. Ethical, social and environmental accounting allow assessing the performance of an organization on a set of ethical, social and environmental topics, typically resulting in the publishing of a sustainability report. Mission-driven social impact assessment allows determining the extent to which an organization achieves their mission, typically by analyzing the social consequences of an organization’s processes, projects, programs, or policies. Life-cycle assessment methods typically aim at identifying positive and negative effects across the complete life-cycle or supply chain of products or services. For each family of methods, we present evidence-based research on the motivations that organizations have to apply such methods, we review the variability of practices in this domain, and present several relevant methods, as well as a reference method that generalizes the practice. We also discuss supporting software tool, with a focus on openESEA, an open-source, model-driven application that can be configured through textual method specifications.