公众参与区域可持续发展评估是公众参与可持续发展的重要途径之一，由公众参与的评估结果更切合区域实际并易于公众认可。从公众参与视角出发，依据大众性、科学性、简明性与动态性原则，设计了由18个指标构成的区域可持续发展指标体系框架及调查问卷，并分析了可持续发展趋势与等级确定方法。以地方21世纪议程南阳试点为例，研究了公众参与的区域可持续发展评估的方法，研制了可持续发展“晴雨表”。

Public participatory sustainable development assessment is one of the important ways of participation in sustainable development. The assessment result with public participation is more identified in practice and is easier to be admitted by public. From the perspective of public participation, the paper designs a framework of the regional sustainable development indicators, which consists of four first level indicators (environment, resource, economy and social) and 18 second level indicators and its investigation questionnaire under the principles of popularity, science, conciseness and developments. On the basis of the comprehensive assessment numerical value(M), the author decides the trend, which is toward or backward the sustainable development. According to the exact scope of M value, the author judges the grades that are toward sustainable development or backward sustainable development. With the data of 7765 questionnaires, the author takes the example of Nanyang Experimental City on Local Agenda 21 to study the method of assessing the regional sustainable development by public and develops the sustainable development barometer. The research indicates that the assessment results with relative principle are more tally with the regional practice, especially when the quantity of questionnaire is big enough. The intuitionistic barometer of sustainable development is a good type of information exhibition, which is easy to be accepted by the public. As the result of assessment, the barometer can be published on the local newspaper or the information network for the public to know the state of the regional sustainable development. This information may also tell people what effect has been gotten and needs to be stick and what problems are being existed and need to be solved.