The Idea of Indicators

Data has become our way of knowing the world. Increasingly, we trust numbers and rankings more than personal experiences like the visitors to the spoof restaurant The Shed at Dulwich that was rated number 1 on Tripadvisor. Everyday we make multiple decisions based on indicators. Whether looking for a place to study, choosing a product, finding a place to eat, we depend on rankings and ratings to base our decisions on. Our institutions, businesses and governments likewise use indicators to comprehend, plan and monitor. While the terms data and indicators are used interchangeably, its important to delve in the difference. Indicators are based on primary statistics and data but represent more that the data through a synthesis of conditions and trends.

My interest in indicators has slowly evolved over the past decade. As a researcher during my PhD, I was drawn to their appeal as tools that support decision-making. Over the course of the PhD as my engagement with the way we use indicators deepened, and later as I started looking at the field of sustainability studies more critically, my relationship with indicators especially those that we use to assess sustainability has changed.

Indicators are a technology of governance, they originate from and propagate the dominant worldviews. This would not be an issue unless our goal was to transition society to a more sustainable worldview, which requires fundamental shifts in the ways we see,think and engage with the world. If we measure our 'progress' towards sustainability through indicators and methodologies that originate in the current reductionist worldview, we cannot hope for it to enable the transition we seek. Do we need indicators that simplify the world for us or do we need indicators that make the complexity of the world comprehensible?

The idea of indicators is one of the most powerful tools of governance to have emerged in the recent past. Its hegemonizing power is evidenced in the proliferation of indicators in every field, at every level and for every problem. The slogan you can't manage what you can't measure has incentivized quantitative indicators over qualitative and the drive to measure has meant that we end up in situations where we only value what we can measure and not measure what we value.

In this series of posts I will look at the idea of indicators

The possibilities and problems of the indicators

A history of Indicators

Perspectives on Indicators

Shifting the lens in thinking through indicators

Stay tuned!!