Improving sustainability in communities: Linking the local scale to the concept of sustainable development

Sustainability challenges can be faced at local, urban and national scale leading to diverse initiatives constrained mainly by economic and cultural limits. Of these three levels, the local has the advantage of being the closest to people and therefore encouraging active collaboration. The aim of this research is to realize a path towards community sustainability based on maturity assessment. Our intent is to explore how to link the local scale to the concept of sustainable development and how to achieve a dynamic evaluation and management of sustainability. We obtain a maturity-based sustainability assessment through a framework based on territorial context analysis (scoping phase), maturity assessment (design phase) and case study application (evaluation phase). A small community located in Italy was selected for our case study. This research proposes a sustainability maturity assessment that embraces all the plans, programmes and initiatives needed to define improvement goals and strategies covering all aspects of sustainability. It enables the dynamic management of sustainability at the local level and allows communities to define sustainability strategies in which maturity assessment plays a key role by linking the existing situation with improved future situations.