Is social life cycle assessment really struggling in development or is it on a normal path towards harmonization/standardization?

Social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) has been already introduced in the scientific literature in 1996with the term Bsocietal LCA^ (O’Brian M et al. 1996), but today it seems that it has not yet reached complete acceptance from the scientific community. Indeed, being among the three methodologies that assess the (environmental, economic, and social) impacts of a product’s life cycle, it is the most discussed in the last decade, in particularly since the guidelines for social life cycle assessment were published by the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative in 2009 (UNEP/SETAC 2009; Benoît et al. 2010). On one hand, it makes sense that this technique is less standardized compared to the other two and still presents many challenges in its implementation and in the definition of impact pathways; on the other hand, often the scientific discussion focuses too much attention on searching to legitimize models for the social and anthropologic aspects using an engineering approach to life cycle thinking (Iofrida et al. 2017). We should not forget the main reasons that brought us to the development of social life cycle assessment in the first place: