Why use The Triple Bottom Line to Make Decisions?

We live in an era of shrinking public resources—and shrinking trust in public institutions. Citizens want limited public funds to be used wisely. Citizens want their government to do more with less: promote economic vitality, support healthy communities, and protect our natural environment. Moreover, citizens want to understand what public agencies are doing with their money and why.

TBL is an approach to making better decisions and is also an approach to explaining more transparently the costs and benefits of decisions to the general public to promote greater understanding, trust, and support.

A key feature of TBL is to remind decision-makers and the public that better decisions will result from considering all important impacts of a decision—short-term and long-term trade-offs—and how those impacts are distributed.

A more complex example of TBL in public policy making is outline in this summary of  Sustainable Transportation Planning

image source: Creative Commons

A basic example of TBL in household decisions is found in a case study using triple bottom line in decision making consider a couple Buying a New Car