Establishing the holistic sustainability evaluation framework for Asia-Pacific regions by exploring local practices in China

Traditional reductionist methods of analysis, which breakdown and isolate the component parts will bring the risk of fragmented decision making with potential unforeseen consequences. The Holistic Sustainability Evaluation Framework for Asia-Pacific Regions developed in previous research discusses the overlapping worldviews of the east and west to provide better understanding on systems theory to be applied on sustainability evaluation methods based on the indigenous approaches of China. The conceptual process utilizes the eastern thinking model into the organisation of sustainable development evaluation framework, which can be adopted by policy-makers, designers, and stakeholders in Asia-Pacific. The construction of a theoretical framework toward an indigenous environmental philosophy can be applied to current sustainable urban development issues in China and Asia-Pacific. However, its applicability in different cultural regions and local practice still needs to be tested. This paper is to further establish the qualitative criteria and quantitative indicators for evaluation from case studies on urban developments at different spatial scales of selected Chinese cities. The future work is to validate this framework by testing an external case in China.