These dashboards are useful in at least two respects. First, they are an initial step in any analysis of
sustainability, which by its nature is highly complex and therefore necessitates an effort at establishing a list
of relevant variables and encouraging national and international statistical offices to improve the
measurement of these indicators. The second one is related to the distinction between "weak" and "strong"
sustainability. The "weak" approach to sustainability considers that good performance in some dimensions
can compensate for low performance in others. This allows a global assessment of sustainability using
mono-dimensional indices. The "strong" approach argues that sustainability requires separately maintaining
Mis-measuring Our Lives (Reframed)
20
the quantity or quality of many different environmental items. Following this up therefore requires large sets
of separate statistics, each pertaining to one particular subdomain of global sustainability.
Dashboards nevertheless suffer because of their heterogeneity, at least in the case of very large and eclectic
ones, and most lack indications about causal links, their relationship to sustainability and/or hierarchies
among the indicators used. Further, as communications instruments, one frequent criticism is that they lack
what has made GDP a success: the powerful attraction of a single headline figure allowing simple
comparisons of socioeconomic performance over time or across countries.
Composite Indices
Composite indices are one way to circumvent the problem raised by the richness of dashboards and to
synthesize the abundant and purportedly relevant information into a single number. The technical report
reviews a few of these.
For example, Osberg and Sharpe's Index ,of Economic Well- Being is a composite indicator that
simultaneously covers current prosperity (based on measures of consumption), sustainable accumulation and
social topics (reduction in inequalities and protection against "social" risks). Environmental issues are
addressed by considering the costs of CO2 emissions per capita. Consumption flows and wealth accumulation
(defined broadly to include R&D stocks, a proxy for human capital and the costs of CO2 emissions) are
evaluated according to national accounts methodology.
Each dimension is normalized through linear scaling (nine OECD countries) and aggregation relies on equal
weighting. But at this stage the "green" dimension of this index is still secondary.
Other examples focus more specifically on the green dimension, such as the "Environmental Sustainability
Index" (ESI) and the "Environmental Performance Index" (EPI). The ESI covers 5 domains: environmental
systems (their global health status), environmental stress (anthropogenic pressure on the environmental
systems), human vulnerability (exposure of inhabitants to environmental disturbances), social and
institutional capacity (their capacity to foster effective responses to environmental challenges) and global
stewardship (cooperation with other countries in the management of common environmental problems). It
uses 76 variables to cover these 5 domains. There are, for instance, standard indicators for air and water
quality (e.g., S02 and NOx)' health parameters (e.g., infant death rate from respiratory diseases),
environmental governance (e.g., local Agenda 21 initiatives per million people), etc.
The EPI is a reduced form of the ESI, based on 16 indicators (outcomes), and is more policy-oriented.
The messages derived from this kind of index are ambiguous. The global ranking of countries has some
sense, but it is often considered to present an overly optimistic view of developed countries' contributions to
environmental problems. Problems also arise between developed countries. For instance, the index shows a
very narrow gap between the United States and France, despite strong differences in terms of their CO2
emissions. In fact, the index essentially informs us about a mix of current environmental quality, of pressure
on resources and of the intensity of environmental policy, but not about whether a country is actually on a
sustainable path: no threshold value can be defined on either side of which we would be able to say that a
country is or is not on a sustainable path.
On the whole, these composite indicators are better regarded as invitations to look more closely at the
various components that underlie them. This kind of function of composite indicators has often been put
forward as one of their main raisons d' etre. But this is not reason enough to retain them as measures of
sustainability stricto sensu which could secure the same standing as GDP or other accounting concepts. There
Mis-measuring Our Lives (Reframed)
21
are two reasons for this. First, as with large dashboards, there is the lack of a well-defined notion of what
sustainability means. The second is a general criticism that is frequently addressed at composite indicators,
i.e., the arbitrary character of the procedures used to weight their various components. These aggregation
procedures are sometimes presented as superior the monetary aggregations that are used to build most
economic indices, because they are not linked to any form of market valuation. Indeed, and we shall comeback
to this point several times, there are many reasons why market values cannot be trusted when
addressing sustainability issues, and more specifically their environmental component. But monetary or not,
an aggregation
procedure always means putting relative values on the items that are introduced in the index. In the case of
composite sustainability indicators, we have little understanding of the arguments for put- ting one relative
value or another on all the different variables that matter for sustainability. The problem is not that these
weighting procedures are hidden, non-transparent or non-replicable-they are often very explicitly presented
by the authors of the indices, and this is one of the strengths of this literature. The problem is rather that
their normative implications are seldom made explicit or justified.