Social indicators of rural community sustainability: an example from the Woady Yaloak catchment

The author states that successful planning for sustainable rural development must balance and integrate ecological, economic and social elements within a community but there are difficulties in identifying locally meaningful social indicators. In this paper she draws on the findings of a project based in the Woady Yaloak catchment area, Victoria, concerned with developing a system for social reporting. She describes the process used to construct a suite of social indicators of rural community sustainability, and the key indicators of social wellbeing which were elicited from local stakeholders. This system of indicators offers a framework for incorporating social values to assist the delivery of information for decision-making.