Sustainable Development Sust. Dev. 9, 1–15 (2001) SUSTAINABILITY INDICATORS: THE PROBLEM OF INTEGRATION Stephen Morse 1, *, Nora McNamara 2 , Moses Acholo 2 and Benjamin Okwoli 2 1 Department of Geography, University of Reading, Reading, UK 2 Diocesan Development Services, POB 114, Idah, Kogi State, Nigeria Sustainability indicators (SIs) are increasingly seen as important tools in the implementation of sustainable development. Numerous suggested SI lists and matrices exist, but a remaining problem is how these diverse SIs are to be integrated into an answer as to whether something is sustainable or not. In some studies of sustainability workers have adopted a quantitative integration approach whereby SIs are given numerical values and integrated mathematically to produce a value for sustainability. In this paper the authors discuss SI integration by drawing upon the results of a six-year research project based in a village in Nigeria. They conclude that an element of’qualitative integration’ incorporating value judgements and subjectivity is inevitable with a concept such as sustainability, even if one begins with what may seem like sharp and quantitative SIs. It is argued that SIs are primarily a product of development intervention rather than a desire to understand, and as a result carry with them the desired characteristics, from the donor perspective, of efficiency and accountability. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. Received 6 January 2000 Revised 9 February 2000 Accepted 22 February 2000 INTRODUCTION O ne typically comes across two funda- mental, distinct and broad visions of the concept of agricultural sustainabil- ity (Hansen, 1996): 1. sustainability as an approach and 2. sustainability as a property. With sustainability as an approach some practices are seen as ’sustainable’ while others are not. The result is typically a package of ’good’ practice (crop rotation, soil conserva- tion, low or reduced use of fertilizer, pesti- cide, fossil fuels, etc.) that at least has the advantage of clear definition (Goldman, 1995; Penfold et al., 1995). One can monitor progress towards sustainability by simply noting the implementation of’good’ practices. Sustainability seen as a system property seeks to define the ability of the system to exist in some preferred state and continue to deliver its products over time (Clayton and Radcliffe, 1996). This vision poses more * Correspondence to: Dr Stephen Morse, Department of Geogra- phy, PO Box 227, Whiteknights, University of Reading, RG6 6AB, UK. Tel.: +44 118 9318736. E-mail: s.morse@reading.ac.uk Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.