Editorial for the special issue on MATISSE

Introduction: The topic of this special issue is Integrated Sustainability Assessment (ISA) and its potential role in achieving sustainability-oriented governance and more sustainable development. This is a topic that has featured before in the International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development. Two of the Guest Editors for this special issue, Paul M. Weaver and Jan Rotmans, wrote a paper introducing ISA and its development in the context of the EC-funded Methods and Tools for Integrated Sustainability Assessment (MATISSE) project, which was published in the journal in 2006. The Weaver–Rotmans paper was written at the outset of the MATISSE project when ISA was at an early stage of conceptual development and its potential was still to be developed and tested. The tool and model development activities of the MATISSE project and its illustrative case studies were then only just at their start. It is now timely and appropriate, therefore, as the MATISSE project nears its completion, that we follow up on that earlier paper, reporting what progress has been made and making available the latest project developments and emerging findings about ISA. This special issue provides a far broader and much deeper treatment of issues that the earlier paper could only touch on briefly.