The cases studied suggest that the socio-political dimension
needs as much recognition and consideration in the design
and implementation of a sustainability indicator development
process as the knowledge or substance dimension. This seems not
to be fully recognized yet. Secondly, science-led initiatives do also
‘‘vote’’ on the inclusion and exclusion of indictors or related subclasses;
this voting procedure is not scientific in a positivist sense,
but can be characterised as ‘political’. Thirdly, while in political
processes most actors are representatives of democratically
elected politicians, participation in science-led process is mostly
restricted to ‘‘invited’’ experts (in their fields) and some policymakers
that are recognized experts in relevant issue areas and may
thus not be representative
The analysis of the cases shows that in practice all allowed a
number of actors from both domains (science and policy) to
participate in indicator development. However, science and policyled
processes had a different bias: in science-led processes there
was, by design, a bias towards the knowledge production
dimension, and less explicit recognition and inclusion of the
normative political dimension in the indicator development
process, particularly also with regard to participation. This is partly due to the research project
character of these processes, which limits possibilities for
Table 8.
This raises the question: what is better, a slightly more
accurate but politically less relevant set, or a slightly less accurate
but politically more relevant set? And, from that follows: what is
the appropriate role of scientists in designing indicator sets:
moderators, knowledge brokers, or leaders of development
processes?