Gaby Umbach

Introduction: Of Numbers and Narratives—Indicators in Global Governance and the Rise of a Reflexive Indicator Culture

There is a pervasive sense in which we seem to be living under a new avalanche of numbers, and in particular an avalanche of indicators beyond the state and purporting to create knowledge on a global scale. As much as our indicator culture engenders a “faith in numbers”, the very expansion of the power of numbers and their role in (global) governance over the last 20 years has brought with it a heightened sense that quantification, indicators, and rankings are a way of doing politics that must be engaged with from within and without the specific disciplinary knowledge (such as statistics and econometrics) that underwrite their claims to objectivity. The chapters collected in this Handbook aim to capture the contemporary indicator culture, with all its discordant and contrasting orientations. The present introductory chapter considers three main dimensions. First, no chapter in the Handbook adopts a naively metrological understanding of indicators as simply “measuring” reality. Second, the normativity of measurement is a consistent theme of the contributions by both scholars and practitioners. Third, despite their popularity and seeming capacity to shape debates, the power of indicators remains highly contextual and dependent on how they are enrolled in particular, situated, networks of actors and influence.

Conclusions: Knowing and Governing

Measuring is a way of doing politics. Scholars and practitioners, who contributed to this Handbook, agreed that measuring mattered because of its instrumentality in governing. They however came to contrasting conclusions about the way forward and the volume therefore reflected this variety of discordant interpretations. Some contributions contested the effectiveness of the existing indicator culture and addressed methodological solutions inspired by standards of scientific objectivity, like a focus on performance indicators or institutional quality dimensions, improved techniques, internal validity, and reliability. Others were critical about the contemporary indicator culture because of normative premises, as well as intended and unintended consequences, ranging from the creation of distorted ontologies of the real, and the instrumental, conceptual hybridity in serving the pervasiveness of the neo-liberal paradigm of governance and the simplification of social complexity, over the external interference in the legitimacy of domestic policy decision-making, to the dissemination of corporate governance mechanisms. Many contributors proposed solutions that in their view better suited the decentralisation of governance. Their chapters did not demand pure mechanical objectivity but rather a better transformation of politics into metrics through locally embedded, disaggregated, micro-level, country-specific data and systems of knowledge creation.

EP-EUI Policy roundtable evidence and analysis in EU policy-making : concepts, practice and governance

The EP-EUI Policy Roundtable on Evidence and Analysis in EU Policy-Making was co-organised by the Global Governance Programme (GGP) of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS) and the Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) of the European Parliament on 7th November 2016, in Florence. It brought together practitioners and academics who discussed recent developments in evidence-based policy-making together with Professor Ioan Mircea Paşcu, Vice-President of the European Parliament (EP) and Professor Renaud Dehousse, President of the European University Institute (EUI), who jointly provided the concluding remarks of the event. The scientific coordinators of the roundtable were Wilhelm Lehmann, EP Fellow at the EUI and Gaby Umbach, GlobalStat/EUI.

Representing, Reducing or Removing Complexity: Indicators of Sustainability and Fiscal Sustainability

During the last two decades numerous indicators measuring sustainability and its different dimensions have been created. The 2007 economic crisis led to increased scrutiny of public sector fiscal imbalances, and efforts to create more sophisticated measures of fiscal sustainability. The literature on this recent formulation and use of sustainability indicators is broad and contested. It however largely tends to focus on fiscal components, while wider meanings of sustainability are accounted for to a lesser degree. This working paper examines the conceptual and empirical questions relating to the production of indicators of sustainability, both in the sense of fiscal sustainability and sustainable development. It also discusses the uses of sustainability indicators.