1 The need for reliable and pertinent indicators to guide the sustainable development process was recognised early, at the time of the Rio Conference. It was reaffirmed in many sections of Agenda 21 the programme document which was agreed at the summit, and was the central theme of Chapter 40, the last one, which deals with information required for decision-making. The most explicit reference to the limitations of existing indicators and to the need for new ones to evaluate sustainability is in paragraph 40.4:

40.4. Commonly used indicators such as the gross national product (GNP) and measurements of individual resource or pollution flows do not provide adequate indications of sustainability. Methods for assessing interactions between different sectoral environmental, demographic, social and developmental parameters are not sufficiently developed or applied. Indicators of sustainable development need to be developed to provide solid bases for decision-making at all levels and to contribute to a self-regulating sustainability of integrated environment and development systems.

Therefore:

40.22. Countries and international organizations should review and strengthen information systems and services in sectors related to sustainable development, at the local, provincial, national and international levels. Special emphasis should be placed on the transformation of existing information into forms more useful for decision-making and on targeting information at different user groups. Mechanisms should be strengthened or established for transforming scientific and socio-economic assessments into information suitable for both planning and public information. Electronic and non-electronic formats should be used.

• 1  This formulation would suggest that sustainable development is primarily concerned with systems an (. )

2 In the opinion of the authors of Agenda 21, current indicators (including GDP) are incapable of evaluating the sustainability of systems1. Furthermore, existing information cannot be used in this format for decision-making and must be converted and then redirected at the various user groups. Several questions are left unanswered, to which the authors of Agenda 21 would have us reply. Who are these groups of users? Into what forms, more appropriate for decision-making, should the information be converted? How should it be converted for use in decision-making? What sectors are involved in sustainable development? In the following paper, we will be suggesting a few pointers to respond to these questions and some indications on the construction of appropriate information systems for sustainable development, i.e. adequate, pertinent and acceptable to all development actors. In the space available, it will not be possible to provide sufficiently detailed and qualified considerations of these issues, so that certain simplifications will have to be used, at the risk of painting with a broad brush at times. For example, the subject of the various user groups will be dealt with in a voluntarily reductive fashion, based on the following question Indicators for whom: governments or citizens? The question on the more or less usable forms will be limited to asking scoreboard or synthetic indices?. And the question of sectors involved in sustainable development will be reduced to a comparison between four major approaches to the actual object of sustainable development. Contrary to what a strictly logical sequence would require, we will begin with a discussion of the issue scoreboard or Synthetic Index because it necessarily takes us along a preliminary exploration of certain definitions which are essential for an understanding of what follows.

3 The concept of indicators was originally used in a purely scientific context: sociological research. It designated the translation of theoretical (abstract) concepts into observable variables so that the scientific hypotheses involving these concepts could be submitted to empirical verification. We come across the word in a seminal text by Lazarsfeld on the operationalisation of sociological theories (Lazarsfeld, 1958) where the various stages in the translation of concepts into indices were clearly identified and analysed for the first time.

• 2  Sometimes called a macro-indicator.

4 An indicator is therefore an observable variable used to report a non-observable reality. As regards the word ‘index’2. it designates a synthetic indicator constructed by aggregating other so-called ‘basic indicators. Most of the indicators used in public policy-making are in fact indices: this is true for GDP, the index of consumer prices, stock exchange indices such as the Dow-Jones and the Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nationals Development Programme (UNDP).

5 Shortly after Lazarsfeld’s article was published, the word ‘indicator, to which the ‘social’ was added as a qualifier, became popular in the public domain, or at least in the domain of public policy. A social indicator movement emerged in the United States, then in Europe, following the publication by Bauer, Biderman and Gross (1966) of a report called Social Indicators. Whereas for Lazarsfeld and later, the scientific community, the role of indicators was purely methodological, it became normative and axiological with the movement for social indicators. The reference to norms and values is given at the outset in the definition Bauer gives for social indicators: statistics, statistical series, and all other forms of evidence that enable us to assess where we stand and are going with respect to our values and goals . (Bauer et al. 1966, p1).

6 While the term indicator was new, the reality described was much older, not to say immemorial. The same term in fact covered two traditions, one, age-old and the other going back to the industrial revolution. The first is the concept of statistics in the original meaning of the word, i.e. the methodical study of social facts by numerical processes (classifications, counting, quantified inventories and censuses) for the purpose of information and assisting governments. The other more recent source is to be found in the numerous movements for social reform and hygiene at the time of the industrial revolution. At the start of the 19th century, philanthropists (often physicians or clergymen) were using statistical data on housing, living and working conditions, income, alcoholism, prisons, etc. with the aim of reforming society and improving the lot of the underprivileged. In the United States, the first known use of social indicators for the purpose of social reform goes back to around 1810, with the production of statistical data for five consecutive years on the number of inmates awaiting trial in Philadelphia prisons (Cohen, 1982). Other surveys are well-known, such as those on poverty by Villermé (1782-1863) in France, Ducpétiaux (1804-1868) in Belgium and Booth (1840-1916) in the U.K.

• 3  BOX 1: The various development indicators

HDI, the Human Development Index , was created by the Uni (. )

7 After the decline of the social indicators movement of the sixties, the concept of social indicator suffered a lapse of several decades before re-emerging quite recently, first with reference to the measurement of human welfare and development and later with reference to the notion of sustainability and sustainable development. Observers, among them Gadrey and Jany-Catrice (2003), Perret (2002) and Sharpe (2004) were numerous in remarking on the recent proliferation of attempts—if not at replacing GDP—at least supplementing it with a more adequate synthetic measurement of well-being. Box 1 gives a brief presentation of these various indices3 .

8 Among these attempts, only one achieved a real measure of success: this was the UNDP Human Development Index. All the others—be it the ISEW (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) created by Daly and Cobb (1990), the GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator, see Talberth et al, 2006) the MDP (Measure of Domestic Progress, Jackson, 2004), the Index of Economic Well-being created by Sharpe and Osberg (2002), the HWI (Human Wellbeing Index Prescott-Allen, 2001), etc.—failed to gain much favour or sufficient legitimacy to become institutionalised. For an exhaustive census of welfare and quality of life indices or macro-indicators, see Gadrey and Jany-Catrice’s (2003) and Sharpe (2004).

• 4  Which we are told he was at first reluctant to do (see Gadrey, 1993, pp.20-21).
• 5  The Social Inclusion Indicators developed for the E.U. Commission are the most widely accepted of (. )

9 The exception represented by the Human Development Index is rather enlightening: without the backing of the Nobel Prize for Economic Science laureate Amartya Sen4. it probably would also have failed to pass muster. On closer examination, it is not so much indicators that come up against a degree of opposition (in particular from the scientific community) but rather indices or synthetic indicators. There is no opposition, quite the contrary, to the proliferation of scoreboards of every variety, i.e. batteries of indicators, be it in the environmental or the social sectors5. However, the construction of indices, in particular the Human Development Index, sets off reactions such as the one by Baneth, for example, who goes so far as to say: It was a vain, pretentious and slightly ridiculous endeavour to try to sum up human development in all its complexity and multiple dimensions with a single figure.. . (Baneth, 1998, p23).

10 And yet the only difference between a management chart and a synthetic index lies in the ultimate phase of the construction and measuring process of the indicators: that is the production, using basic indicators, of a single synthetic value for the purpose of condensing the information contained in the management chart. In other words, a synthetic index is no more or less than a scoreboard to which is added an extra indicator made up of the aggregation of the data contained in it. But it would seem that for some people, this ultimate phase is all the difference between a rigorously serious and scientific effort and a subjective, ideological and fanciful exercise.