Social values and sustainable development: community experiences

BACKGROUND: This paper presents a review of the literature and trends related to social values and sustainable development and describes a set of case studies from a variety of community-based projects which illustrate the advantages that social values bring about as part of efforts to promote sustainability. Three approaches were used to develop this study: a bibliometric analysis of the topic “social values and sustainable development”, an analysis of case studies that concretely present community projects addressing social values and sustainability, and the development of a framework linking up bibliometric clusters and the cases studies. RESULTS: While the bibliometric analysis revealed clusters where social values are strongly connected with sustainable development, the case studies indicated the lack of a common terminology and understanding of the relation between social values, sustainable development, and community-based projects. CONCLUSIONS: The study concludes by suggesting a set of measures that could be deployed to better take social values into account when planning policies or making decisions related to community projects.