Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/rser Assessment of Latin American sustainability Olfa Toumi a, ⁎ , Julie Le Gallo b , Jaleleddine Ben Rejeb a a LAMIDED, ISG Sousse, University of Sousse, 4000 Sousse, Tunisia b CESAER UMR1041, AgroSup Dijon, INRA, 26 Bd Petitjean, 21079 Dijon Cedex, France ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Sustainable development Entropy method Evaluation Latin America ABSTRACT This paper aims at assessing the sustainability of development in eleven Latin American countries. For that purpose, we establish an evaluation index system grouped into four subsystems (economic subsystem, social subsystem, ecologic subsystem and institutional subsystem). The weights for the index subsystems of sustainable development are based on the concept of entropy. The empirical results show that the sustainable development strategy in this group of countries is not efficient and is characterized by a lack of coordination between the four dimensions. This quantitative evaluation provides a new perspective for research in sustainable development researches and guidance for public policies. 1. Introduction Given the global degradation of the environment, climate change due to human activities and trends of environmental, technological and economic globalization, implementing a sustainable development strategy has become an important issue. The concept of “sustainable development” was introduced in the context of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the purpose of which was to find agreements between countries on actions and measures to be taken for saving natural resources and protecting the environment. The concept of sustainable development not only refers to the durability of environ- ment quality, but it also points to social, economic and institutional aims. Later, the Kyoto protocol of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) (1997) was regarded as the first global collective effort to address climate change, notably by ensuring financial support for lean energy projects. The main mechan- ism included in the protocol is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which requires projects to guarantee sustainable development to receive financial assistance. More recently, the Conference of Parties (COP) (2011) resulted in a legally binding agreement on climate. In this context, correctly assessing the level of sustainability has become of utmost importance for international organizations, govern- mental institutions and in also the academic literature [1–5]. The purpose of these indicators should be to meet the goals, clarify and define the basic conditions for sustainable development, to assess quantitatively the subsequent amendments as well as the stage reached in the development and the sources that support it,i.e. the policies of environmental protection and socio-economic development. A range of indicators has been suggested to quantify this complex and multi- dimensional notion. In particular, in order to ensure a good coordina- tion of the four dimensions of sustainable development mentioned earlier, various authors (e.g [4].) suggest to use a sustainable develop- ment index that combines the four systems, namely the economic, social, environmental and institutional subsystems, including indica- tors that are relevant, understandable, reliable and available. The main objective of this article is to assess the level of sustainable development in Latin American countries. Indeed, Latin American countries have implemented their own set of national policies and strategies to achieve sustainable development [6,7]. For instance [8], distinguishes core areas for sustainable development in Argentina: food industry, communication and technology, mining, tourism and forest conservation [9]. focuses the sustainability of aquaculture in Chile. Case studies for several countries in Central and South America are presented in [6]. In this paper, using the method set out by [4] and [2], we measure the degree of importance of each indicator in the development of each subsystem and the weight of the latter in the global evaluation to determine the sources of development using the entropy weight method. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the sustainability of the whole Latin American region is quantitatively assessed in this comprehensive and unified way. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2017.05.013 Received 10 February 2016; Received in revised form 1 April 2017; Accepted 4 May 2017 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: olfa_toumi_22@hotmail.fr (O. Toumi), julie.le-gallo@agrosupdijon.fr (J. Le Gallo), Jaleleddine.BenRejeb@esct.rnu.tn (J. Ben Rejeb). Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 78 (2017) 878–885 1364-0321/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. MARK