Measuring Social Progress by Sustainable Development Indicators: Cases of Croatia and Slovenia

This paper presents an overview of the progress in the development of indicators of sustainable development (SDI) in Croatia and Slovenia in the context of global challenges. The analysis of indicators is based on the national sets of SDIs developed in recent time by different developers with focus on the EU level in comparison with other regions in the world. Key challenges include: (1) comparability and aggregation variability of SDI in relation to the quality of data determined by the sustainable development policies; (2) impacts and reflections of compiled SDIs on different kinds of user needs; and (3) Social responsibility, as a contribution to, and framework of sustainability. The paper concludes with a consideration of a critical role of SD in measurement of progress in society and some key lessons learned related to the difficulties in implementation of SDI coming from highly fragmented compilation of SDI that usually depends on the needs of the end-users.