This paper presents key findings from an ‘immersion’ that was undertaken in August 2017 on Paquetá and surrounding islands within the Amazon region of Brazil. In this research, immersion is understood as active participation in peoples’ lives over a period of time and supported by other methods including observation, semi-structured interviews and co-mapping. This research adapted the urban metabolism concept commonly used to assess levels of sustainability and resilience, for application to the context of peripheral river islands located in the Tocantins river near the Brazilian city of Belém. It specifically focuses on factors that impact on people’s behaviour in relation to water management, or what is described here as the ‘island water metabolism’. This includes geographic, seasonal, local governance and social dimensions as well as dependence on the rising and falling tides of the river.
The aim of this paper is to estimate and to compare sustainable development processes in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia focusing on institutional dimension of sustainable development. Attention has been focused on the selection of system of indicators with particular emphasis on institutional indicators. The authors employ the most popular two multicriteria methods: Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) and multi-criteria complex proportional method (MCP). Data embracing 2004-2010 year period is being analyzed. In order to obtain a multi-faceted view, several variants of sustainable development estimations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are being performed. Each variant represents a different approach to development perception. The difference lies in emphasis, which is being put on the economic and institutional aspects of development. Hypothesis has been raised that the different methods employed may affect comparison results.