The coding and final form of these tables were achieved as the result of a number of iterations. It must be remembered that the purpose of this exercise was to identify the issues and not to determine which bodies had recognized, implicitly or explicitly, which issues. It is important to recognize that no issue indicates the complete range of sources citing it. The comments below relate to the coding of issues identified in the documents described elsewhere with a view to their presentation in tabular form. It is important to recognize that any form of classification can never be politically neutral.
Classification is a political act.
Many classification systems have in-built biases against either developmental or environmental sensitivity, or both. How issue complexes and agenda topics get clustered and ordered is not a trivial matter without consequence for the sustainability of policies. The difficulty in clustering and coding is much more at the general level than at the specific level. Much work has been done at the specific level where hierarchies of topics are relatively uncontroversial. Little work has been done at the general level where clustering tends to be somewhat simplistic.