You may want to look at ecological economics methods. In this field, principles of ecology are considered as a guide to organize economic measures. You may find some useful methods to apply to evaluation.
I used ecological economics to frame an evaluation of community sustainability for my dissertation, and I recall struggling quite a bit with metrics and how to “box up” those things that are difficult to measure with typical data until I applied this framework.
Regards,
Jess Chandler jchandler@emiconsulting.com
Hi Jess. You actually know something about the subject. Could you provide some more details on what you did?