Alliance Online - September 2007

Over 1,400 people from multinational organizations, government, business, academia and civil society gathered in Istanbul for three days in June to address these key questions at the Second World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy hosted by OECD and partners (European Commission, Organization of the Islamic Conference, United Nations, United Nations Development Program, World Bank).

• An extensive background paper[1] provided an overview of the Forum’s conceptual framework and purpose, which was driven largely by the Global Project initiated by OECD to achieve four main objectives:
• foster a global conversation about the changing meaning of progress;
• galvanize and promote facts-based civic dialogue;
• improve the effectiveness of indicator work and the use of indicators in policy-making;
• make a key contribution to the international discussion in the run-up to the MDG 2015 deadline.

The eventual aim is to change the way traditional statistics establishments like the OECD, and other multinational development organizations and national governments, think about and measure progress for the purpose of better policy-making, and ultimately greater social progress.

So what did the Forum participants have to say about defining, measuring, conveying and fostering progress?

Re-examining the definition of progress and approaches to its measurement

Starting with the opening remarks of the OECD Secretary General and from there on – with panellists such as Kemal Dervis, UNDP Administrator; Ann Veneman, Executive Director, UNICEF; and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Prior Economic Minister of Nigeria – there was broad agreement that new challenges in the 21st century have created an important mandate to expand the definition of progress beyond the traditional yardstick of GDP. The expanded definition will include civic rights and freedoms, accountability and governance, environmental sustainability, and even people’s happiness (building on the happiness indices that have been developed in recent years). Several parallel sessions on ‘mega-trends’ such as climate change, demographics, technology, migration and gender were incorporated into the Forum programme, all of them discussed within the framework of measuring and fostering progress.

How this is to be taken forward, however, is still unclear, as debate continues about the approach to measuring some of these things – and, indeed, about whether they are measurable at all.

Increasing citizens’ access and understanding of statistics

Several discussions highlighted the importance of making statistics more accessible to the public, and the way in which they can help create better policies and democracy. The Forum’s Exhibition Hall had several high-tech products such as Gapminder (www.gapminder.org) and Swivel (www.swivel.com) on display, which aim to make the sharing and using of statistics easier and more efficient. However, several recent studies presented at the Forum – such as that by Princeton Professor Alan Krueger – showed that statistics are less important than ideology in shaping public opinion.

In addition, Professor Ken Prewitt from Columbia University, who led the 2000 Census studies in the US, challenged the audience to think about how different groups (media, political leaders, civil society, academics) use – and sometimes, abuse – indicators. With so much effort and investment going into the measurement process, it was a reminder to ensure politicians do not erase or manipulate numbers, and of the important role civil society and advocacy groups can play in ensuring this doesn’t happen.

Fostering progress: who does what?

The roster of foundation and civil society leaders in various sessions included people from Social Watch, Ashoka, CIVICUS, ACEVO and OXFAM, the Young Foundation (UK), and US foundations such as the Rockefeller, Hewlett and Asia Foundations.

Civil society groups conveyed the important role they are playing not only in fostering progress but also in generating new data and indicator sets (eg Social Watch) to supplement important measures often overlooked by government statistics. The foundation community presented their efforts on supporting evidence-based research and policy analysis, and spoke of the challenges often faced in making this research more accessible to different groups.

The road ahead, and implications for civil society and foundations

On the closing day of the conference, the Secretary General of the OECD announced the Istanbul Declaration, a statement of consensus by the Forum organizing partners and participants which addressed four main action points: to carry out statistical research on the measurement of societal progress in all its dimensions; to design, develop and promote the use of innovative ICT tools to facilitate the transformation of statistics into knowledge – especially making use of wiki 2.0 technology; to establish a global network to foster the measurement of progress in every country; to develop a global infrastructure to facilitate the assessment of societal progress at national and global levels.

What exactly will these actions change and how? The main point is to make the practice of statistics serve better policy-making, especially in an era where the accountability of governments for progress beyond economic development is ever more critical. By increasing the breadth of social progress measurement, we can attract more attention to the dire needs of societies which seem to be progressing economically but not necessarily in other respects. By making use of ICT tools to facilitate the translation of statistics into knowledge, we increase the accessibility of numbers traditionally trapped in libraries and make them more usable by different groups – especially civil society – in making the case for better social and development policy. Finally, by developing a global network and infrastructure for the assessment of societal progress we break down the geographic and sectoral barriers between actors who share common development objectives but currently lack the opportunity to share best practice and knowledge about the real challenges facing societies today.

While these plans, and the energy of discussions over the three days, sound hopeful, the question remains: will any of this really make a difference? When one of the largest international establishments of statisticians and analysts makes an effort to step outside their comfort zone and invite both sceptics and supporters to challenge their traditional approaches to their work, one must give some credit. While there may be a long road ahead, OECD’s increasingly open invitation to this kind of debate is an opportunity that I suggest we in the third sector take up – and perhaps even see it as a chance to reflect on the role of civil society and foundations in measuring and fostering progress.

1 Anat Itay (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) www.oecd.org/dataoecd/44/27/38774779.pdf?contentId=38774770

Filiz Bikmen is Executive Director of TUSEV – the Third Sector Foundation of Turkey. Email filiz@tusev.org.tr

For more information
www.oecd.org/oecdworldforum

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