A critical evaluation of the sustainability balanced scorecard as a decision aid framework

Despite being one of the most renowned systemic thinking decision aid frameworks in sustainability management, the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard (SBSC) suffers from a fragmented literature on architecture design methodologies. These often depend on the modeler's viewpoint, contextual inputs and subjective assessment. A structured critical analysis of the existing architectures and their construction methodologies can make a clear contribution to this field of research. In this paper, we initially present an overview of the major decision aid frameworks used in sustainability management which we classify in two categories: operational methods and systemic approaches. Then, we focus on the SBSC and conduct a critical evaluation of this decision aid framework's key features and architectures in order to depict the most salient characteristics and conceptual flaws. We propose consequently some research directions for the construction of more promising SBSCs. © Research India Publications.