The sustainability assessment (SA) guidelines serve as instructions for evaluating federal government initiatives (laws, programmes, strategies, concepts as well as projects) in terms of sustainable development. A tool in Excel-format is available as a resource for relevance analysis and for simple assessments.
Sustainability assessments meet the requirements of considering the three target dimensions of sustainable development in a balanced manner and pave the way for a transparent presentation and explanation of the decisions taken. In this way, they provide a transparent decision-making basis for the political process. The main focus here is not so much on whether an initiative is sustainable in absolute terms, but rather on optimisation from a sustainable development standpoint.
There are areas of overlap between sustainability assessments and other evaluation instruments such as:
- the Regulierungsfolgenabschätzung (RFA) (german),
- the Economic Assessment of Measures,
- the Leitfaden zur Bewertung von Projekten im Schienenverkehr (NIBA) (german),
- the Nachhaltigkeits-Indikatoren für Strasseninfrastrukturprojekte (NISTRA) (german).
Documents
Documents:
Resources to aid assessment:
Examples of use (German)
Sustainability assessment (SA/NHB) and Regulierungsfolgenabschätzung (RFA):
Nachhaltigkeitsbeurteilung (NHB) und Regulierungsfolgenabschätzung (RFA) zur 2. Revision des Raumplanungsgesetzes (RPG) (PDF, 1 MB, 30.09.2015)This report was updated in the light of the new 2017 bill submitted for consultation. (German)
Botschaft zur Weiterentwicklung der Agrarpolitik (Agrarpolitik 2011) (PDF, 1 MB, 07.12.2007)(German)