Measuring sustainable development in the education area using multi-criteria methods: a case study

Sustainability is a holistic and complex multi-dimensional concept comprising economic, social and environmental issues. The EU Sustainable Development Goals’ indicator set, developed by European Commission, is implemented online in Eurostat’s database and constitutes the basis for assessing the level of sustainability assessment in different areas. The integration of the sustainability indicators was carried out in many studies by using the multi-criteria techniques. This work proposes a new methodological framework based on extended TOPSIS procedure, which takes into account EU targets and/or national targets in building positive ideal solution and negative ideal solution. This algorithm allows compensatory and non-compensatory approach in integrated sustainability assessment from the target point of view. This framework has been applied to measure sustainable development in the area of education in 28 EU countries in 2015. The results of this research also illustrate the complexity of measuring sustainable development, where multiple sustainability criteria and targets are considered.