The multiplicity of principles, attributes, conditions and functions used to approach social sustainability in the academic literature has prevented the emergence of a dominant consensus definition. Instead, we have vague, partial, or long definitions, which are difficult to articulate in precise measurements. By contrast, the evolution in the definition and measurement of poverty offers relevant insights. Even a pragmatic consensus on what constitutes monetary poverty and how to measure it—through the USD 1 per person per day and subsequent updates—has allowed decades of sprawling comparable statistics, monitoring, and research. The operational consensus on a simple definition of monetary poverty has further encouraged alternative definitions and measurements. In fact, the literature on poverty has made significant strides beyond monetary poverty concepts and measurement, leading to the increasingly influential conceptualization and measurement of multidimensional poverty. This evolving consensus has delivered an impressive body of evidence—including dissenting work—contributing to further developments in concepts (e.g., relative vs absolute poverty); definitions (national vs international poverty lines), measurement (MPI vs MODA multidimensional poverty measurements), and analytics (from impact evaluations to fiscal incidence analysis). Social sustainability has lacked a similar conceptual, definitional, and empirical development.

Rather than providing yet another contested definition of social sustainability, we propose focusing on meaningful indicators that capture social sustainability comprehensively and flexibly. The result is a global data set of social sustainability indicators, the Social Sustainability Global Database (SSGD), which aims to shift the focus away from elusive definitions and towards insightful analytics on social sustainability itself.

# **3. Constructing the Social Sustainability Global Database (SSGD)**

Generating a global database of social sustainability indicators contributes to expanding the current evidence in four ways: one, it allows the _benchmarking_ of those indicators between countries; two, it describes social sustainability conditions or _profiles_ within a given country; three, it expands the _analytics_ around social sustainability; and four, it _monitors_ country, regional, or global social sustainability trends over time.

Figure 1 details the four steps used to construct the global database. First, we _mapped available social sustainability indicators_ . We conducted a thorough review of the indicators used by different authors as well as available international and national data sources and evaluated whether the existing data can be feasibly disaggregated. Table 1 below reports the chosen social indicators and the available disaggregation of each indicator. This mapping exercise identifies 11 data sources with fitting indicators related to social sustainability. These sources include harmonized living standards and income and expenditure household surveys from the World Bank's Global Monitoring Database (GMD); regional databases such as Afrobarometer, Arab Barometer, Asian Barometer, and Latinobarómetro; and global databases such as the <mark>Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), V</mark> arieties of Democracy (V-DEM), World Development Indicators, Worldwide Governance Indicators, World Justice Project, and World Values Survey. Using those sources, we identified 71 variables that maximize the number of countries included in the database, as detailed below. The database contains 230 countries and 5