About the Sustainability Audit Matrix (SAM)

Sustainable development is an ambiguous term and often misunderstood especially with regard to its 'implementation'. The Sustainability Audit Matrix (SAM) has been designed to help make sustainable development better understood by scrutinising the work practices of an organisation and helping to identify projects, work streams and activities within that organisation that contribute to sustainable development.

Purpose of the SAM
Whether district councils 'have regard' for the Duty for Sustainable Development or not can be immaterial as the very nature of their role often means they are already (or should be) making a significant contribution to sustainability. The SAM helps demonstrate this by signalling how the organisation, and its different departments and their functions, is essential to creating a more sustainable Northern Ireland.

Development of SAM
Sustainable Northern Ireland has developed a tool (SAM) to assess how sustainability is integrated within an organisation. The SAM was developed to help make sustainable development better understood and to enable its identification within the existing work programmes of an organisation. To do this, the SAM makes an assessment of what the organisation is already doing by identifying policies, practices and functions where sustainability principles are incorporated. It also identifies gaps to enable recommendations to be made.

After a successful pilot of the SAM using two councils, Sustainable Northern Ireland revised the methodology to enable councils across Northern Ireland to undertake a self-assessment of their sustainability.

The SAM measures sustainability within an organisation by looking for evidence of sustainable behaviour or sustainable principles within key documents, departmental plans, activities and from oral discussions with key members of staff. The SAM is made up of 25 elements divided into three seperate themes ; straegic, cross-departmental and operational. The SAM assessment enables an organisation to map their activities to a sustainability framework .

The Self-Assessment Process of Measuring Sustainability
1. Sustainable Northern Ireland delivers a training package to each organisation before they undertake their self-assessment.

2. The organisation undertakes the assessment with Sustainable Northern Ireland available to provide support via e-mail and telephone.

3. Sustainable Northern Ireland review the evidence provided by the organisation during their self-assessment and validates how the officers use this evidence to assign scores to each of the 25 elements of the SAM.

4. The organisation compiles a short report using the SAM results and from this develop and action plan.

5. The process is repeats in 12-18 months.