1981
Remedial Capacity Indicators
Versus Performance Indicators
- / -
Paper prepared for a meeting on social indicators of the Goals, Processes and
Indicators of Development (GPID) project of the United Nations
University (Warsaw, December 1981). Published in:
Insights into Maldevelopment:
reconsidering the idea of progress (Edited by Jan Danecki in cooperation
with Jerzy Krycki and Danuta Markowska). Warsaw, University of Warsaw, 1993.
Also published in Polish under the title:
Wskazniki
zdolsnosci naprawcej in Jana Daneckiego and Marii Daneckiej (Ed).
U
Podloza Globalnych Zagrozen: Dylematy rozwoju (Instytut Politiyki Spolecnej,
Uniwersytetu Warswawkiego, 2003, pp. 62-68).
Introduction
The purpose of this note is to draw further attention to a certain futility
associated with the production of new social indicators as they are currently conceived.
This is not an attempt to argue against the production of such information. For,
as with 'motherhood', few can argue satisfactorily against the value of
obtaining further 'facts'. The difficulty is that the accumulation of data on
what is unsatisfactory appears to be accompanied by a reluctance to recognize or respond
to such information. This can be called 'indicator overload'. The accumulation
of indicators of maldevelopment thus contributes to some degree to a build up of
resistance to initiating new action on the basis of such data. Even 20 years ago it was
noted that:
... it is difficult to escape the conclusion that, in spite of governmental
efforts and similar programmes by nongovernmental organizations, the state of public
opinion on matters of development, particularly in the industrialized countries, is
generally less favourable than it has been in the past.... It would probably be unfair to
conclude that a sudden callousness had overcome public opinion in the developed countries.
It is more like a closing of the gates to a pattern of generalizations perceived as
out-worn by over-use (1)
As has been pointed out on many occasions, there is no lack of information on the
inadequate quality of life in many sectors of society in most countries. Indicators have
been designed to give legitimacy to such information and to portray developments over a
period of time. The problem seems to be that it is very easy for authorities to ignore
published indicators and particularly non-economic indicators. Indicators easily become a
tool of lively debates which are only remotely connected with actual decision-making
processes.
As has been frequently remarked, governments are experiencing increasing
difficulties in managing societies within the present constraints - which are already
forcing the simplification of many issues. Formulating new indicators of the inadequacy of
conditions in society is then of somewhat limited value.
This note is therefore concerned with the need to take into account the
incapacity to act anainst maldevelopment even when appropriate indicators are available.
Examples
Consider the following extreme examples, which have been used to some extent in
press releases. Supposing indicators were available for the coming month or decade on the
number of people in each country who will probably:
- be murdered
- die of starvation
- be tortured
- lose jobs because of discrimination
- be rendered homeless
- start a psychiatric treatment
What use is such information to decision-making bodies? In present circumstances
it would either be ignored, since most facilities and budgets are over-loaded, or result
in minor adaptation in token response to deflect possible criticism. It may even be asked
what effect there would be on what actors if it were known that there was a high
probability that 6 million people would be killed by earthquake in a particular region in
a coming period. Neither people nor institutions have much capacity with which to respond
to such information.
As a further example, starvation is not a significant problem in many LDCs. It is
merely a fact of life for those living there, to which no new response has been possible.
Most people in industrialized countries also perceive starvation in LDCs (if they ever
think about it) as a fact of life to which no new response seems possible (2). Mass
support for emergency relief can only be sustained whilst the problem remains a 9-day
media wonder offering people the possibility of tranquilizing their consciences. Most of
these problems are long-term problems for which such cosmetic solutions are totally
inadequate .
Performance Indicators
Indicators of (comparative) degree of maldevelopment or of maldevelopment trends
therefore clarify the situation as to how bad things are and how much worse they are
likely to get. Such indicators could be called 'performance indicators'. They
offer a description of what is (not) happening.
From a purely academic point of view, or even as a delaying tactic in politics,
it is always possible to call for the generation of more information of this type. Studies
of this kind of 'hard data' offer every opportunity for methodological
refinement and analytical precision.
In a normal management or military environment such indicators would be quite
adequate as a stimulus for remedial action. They would constitute important warnings
calling for rapid response. But such an attitude to indicators is only possible when the
number is limited and the interaction between the conditions they signify is relatively
limited. In fact in such environments care is taken to reduce the number of indicators to
a manageable number. Any others are ignored as of marginal relevance.
Remedial Capacity Indicators
In the complexity of modern society, a key question is the capacity of that
society to respond to indicators, or to information on the N+1-th indicator. This would
seem to suggest the need for a new set of indicators concerning:
- the capacity for recognizing the significance of performance indicators
- the capacity for generating appropriate responses.
These might be termed 'remedial capacity indicators' or 'remedial
potential indicators'. The reciprocal of a remedial capacity indicator might more
forcefully be called an 'impotence indicator'. Such indicators would indicate by
country the capacity for recognizing a problem (implicit in a performance indicator) and
initiating effective remedial action.
In the example given above, particularly with regard to starvation in LDCs, the
relevant remedial capacity indicators would be 'low'. This would make it clear
that however great the starvation, and however much information was available on it, it is
improbable that much of non-cosmetic significance will be done about it at this time.
There is no information in performance indicators which reveals whether the problems they
describe are capable of being comprehended, let alone acted upon. It may be argued that
changes in a particular indicator reveal whether action has been taken in response to the
problem-thus highlighting the 'remedial capacity'. But clearly such changes
may be due to other factors and not to remedial action deliberately taken. On the other
hand, if the remedial capacity indicators were 'high', in the above example, a
country would not need a large amount of information to justify action.
This highlights one problem with performance indicators, namely that the impulse
for designing them usually comes in response to pressure on bodies that are incapable of
acting on the information anyway. Maintaining indicators thus becomes a substitute for
action, since such bodies can always claim that more information. or better indicators,
are required before any action can be justified.
Such indicators would suggest the value of focusing on why a long series of similar
statements on such problems in the past has been of limited value. The focus could then
become how to improve remedial capacity rather than naively assuming, once again, that
this is adequate to the problem on which the debate would otherwise focus with a great
deal of self-satisfaction. It could certainly be argued that such a shift in focus would
be of great value to the disarmament debate which persists in wallowing in armaments
statistics rather than basing new initiatives on statistics concerning, for example, the
number of 'fruitless' disarmament meetings (apparently in excess of 5,000 since
1945). Impotence indicators would decrease the significance of such meetings in their own
right and direct attention to more fruitful avenues whereby this impotence could be
by-passed in such meetings.
Sharpening Public Debate
.A useful consequence of generating 'impotence indicators' would be to
sharpen the nature of public statements. It would counteract the tendency in public debate
for statements to centre on past and expected performance (e.g. with respect to food
supply, overkill capacity pollution, etc.). At present such statements are considered to
be highly significant and may even be considered a highly satisfactory outcome of an
international meeting. If however the 'impotence indicators' indicate a
well-established inability to respond to the problem (e.g. disarmament]. this would
suggest that such statements are of rather limited significance.
Highlighting Action Substitutes
Remedial capacity indicators could help to highlight initiatives which are in
fact substitutes for remedial action. Examples are:
- production of indicators to delay decision-making;
- production of indicators primarily for group self-justification, proving that group A
was right (or 'innocent') and that group B was wrong (or 'guilty');
- selection and manipulation of indicators to make debating points (which the remedial
capacity indicators show to be of limited significance);
- 'cosmetic' or leaky 'initiatives' which look good and defuse concern
(e.g. N-thousand people alphabetized or cured), provided that indicators are not given on
the (increasing) numbers not benefiting from the initiative, namely those whose condition
it has proved incapable of remedying.
Range of Remedia1 Capacity Indicators
The kinds of indicators needed for societies could perhaps be grouped as follows:
- capacity to collectively recognize issues as significant
- capacity to handle performance indicator overload
- capacity to collectively remember recognized issues (cf. the problem of erosion of
collective memory) to increase capacity for future action
- capacity to collectively remember responses to emerging issues that have proved (in)
appropriate in the past
- capacity to generate new responses to (new) issues
- capacity to recognize the positive value of constraints and challenges
- capacity to carry-through action
- capacity to avoid reintroducing the same problem
- capacity to handle problems which can be easily displaced to another functional sector
(possibly to re-emerge later).
Such capacities may be associated with the 'learning capacity' of a society.
They suggest a basic distinction between remedial capacity indicators and performance
indicators. The latter, in the Club of Rome terms, are concerned with societal maintenance
or adaptive learning (reformism), whereas the former are concerned with innovative or
shock learning (transformation)
Non-linear Development
Built into the use of performance indicators is a linear bias which tends to
imply that a higher (or lower) value of the indicator is better (or worse) as the case may
be. In this sense performance indicators are used as simple 'signposts' to the
'good life'. Development does not necessarily proceed in such a linear fashion.
It may prove to be the case that performance indicators go 'down' (indicating
mar-development, say) to permit a necessary phase of re-organization prior to further
advance. This point is explored in a separate paper (3). It may be that a lower growth
rate, for example, is conducive to better quality development. In some cases a
'catastrophe', in the sense of catastrophe theory, may be a necessary
preliminary to the transformation by which a better quality of life may be achieved. There
is also the possibility that a satisfactory performance according to indicators may
disguise the increasing vulnerability of a society to a catastrophe into an even more
mar-developed condition.
Remedial capacity indicators should be sensitive to such non-linear
possibilities.
Integrating Indicator Sets
An interesting characteristic of the use of performance indicators is that they
tend to be cited in isolation. This makes it very difficult to grasp problems which shift
their domain of manifestation from one sector to another. Thus an economic problem may
apparently be 'solved' in one country, only because it now takes a social form.
Each such form would be covered by a different indicator, whereas the problem may
'migrate' between several such sectors manifesting only in the one which is
currently the weakest. Clearly there is a need to work with sets of indicators and this is
especially true with remedial capacity indicators. The question then calling for further
research is what types of indicators are required and what type of integrated set do they
need to constitute. As a step in exploring this possibility, an exercise was conducted in
a separate paper to interrelate sets of 'operators' significant to the
development process (4). Each such operator could be made the basis for a capacity
indicator. A basic point made in formulating such sets was that operators in a set should
be complementary but logically incompatible or incommensurable. This was done as a way of
internalizing within the set the disagreement to which any set gives rise.
In that paper the operators correspond to different levels of operation or
different types of resource management problem. In general it would seem that the later
sets in the series correspond to more precisely defined integrated operations, whereas the
earlier ones correspond to more general aptitudes and skills required to control the more
integrated operations. The sets were elaborated on the basis of a number of fundamental
sets derived from a cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary exploration (5). The number of
elements in each set is low for the more general sets and progressively higher for the
more specific sets. Of the 20 sets studied, the first 13 could be identified as follows,
appropriately adapted in remedial capacity terms:
- Innovative capacity, namely the change initiating capacity
- Intensification capacity, namely the capacity to arouse (creative)
disagreement concerning the nature of any remedial action
- Mediative capacity, namely the transformation of disagreements into
a motive force
- Learning capacity, namely the ability to respond to feedback in order
to improve the quality of the action
- Concretizing capacity, namely the ability to give practical form to
the intended innovation
- Sustaining capacity, namely the ability to ensure continuity of action
- Diversity interrelationship capacity, namely the ability to promote
the innovation through a variety of modes of action, each appropriate to
different conditions
- Constraint handling capacity, namely the ability to work with and use
constraints
- Implementation capacity, namely the ability to complete the various
phases of a transformation cycle
- Programme maintenance capacity, namely the ability to continue the
routine effort required by a long-term programme
- Importance handling capacity, namely the ability to handle the processes
which are engendered once an innovation programme acquires recognized importance
in a society
- Adaptive capacity, namely the ability to integrate the innovative programme
into the range of other programmes and processes in society
- Renewal capacity, namely the ability to handle the eventual disintegration
of the programme and to bring about any necessary renewal.
This approach clearly calls for much further work, but the 210 set elements elaborated
in the earlier paper offer an interesting line of investigation. It should be noted that
in that paper the aim was not only to interrelate the elements of each set, but also to
interrelate the sets so as to contain conceptually the development process.
Controlling Performance Misinterpretation
A difficulty with performance indicators is the ease with which they can be
misinterpreted, even when grouped into sets. One aspect of this is the problem of
detecting missing dimensions or hidden limitations. It may be asked, for example, what
aspects of human development get lost in the different interpretations of 'human
development' by WHO, ILO, UNESCO and the UNDP (6). For this reason it is useful to
test sets of performance indicators against 'societies' of different types which
have well-known deficiencies in order to determine whether these can be detected by any
set of indicators. Types of societies, which might be used for 'thought experiments')
to test such indicators, could include in decreasing order of maldevelopment:
- 'factory-farm' model, emphasizing animated production units;
- zoological garden model, in which the beings are kept for display, entertainment, or
research;
- 'respectable animal' reserves where there is some suspicion that the beings
may have a high order of intelligence (e.g. dolphins);
- traditional slave farm, in which human beings were 'bred' for productivity
(e.g. Roman period, or 18th century America);
- enlightened slave farm, in which some emphasis was placed on educating slaves (e.g.
Greek period);
- military training camp;
- prison camps and re-education centres;
- preserved cultures in indigenous reservations (e.g. Indian tribes in North America);
- qhetto.
The question is to what extent performance indicators warn against the emergence
of a 'factory-farm' society along the style of 'Brave New World'. To
what extent do performance indicators distinguish such extreme cases from contemporary
societies? Does the use of remedial capacity indicators clarify the extent to which each
such society can ameliorate its own condition? From such investigations may emerge a more
adequate definition of maldevelopment based not on (temporary) falls in performance
indicators, but rather on the (long-term) impotence signalled by low indicators of
remedial capacity.
Notes
- UN Secretary General, Review and Appraisal of the 'Dissemination of Information
and Mobilization of Public Opinion Relative to Problems of Development', E/5358,
21 May 1973.
- The problem of society's delayed, minimalistic, token response to major disasters is
well illustrated by the Ethiopian food crisis of 1984/1985 and the ambiguous attitudes
aroused by daily television coverage of death and suffering on a scale equivalent to that
of Nazi concentration camps. One might debate the correspondences between the Nazi past
responsibility for physical violence in the camps and the world community's current
responsibility for structural violence in Ethiopia. The question is how to provide
indicators of society's inertia in responding to crises, even to those which are expected
to result in many further deaths in the near future. It is the inertia which is the key,
not the availability of food reserves.
- Anthony Judge. Development through alternation, Brussels: Union
of International Associations, 1983 (Revised version of a paper for the 7th
Network Meeting of the Goais, Processes and Indicators of Development project
of the United Nations University, Colombo, 1982). [text]
- Anthony Judge. Beyond method; engaging opposition
in psycho-social organization
(Paper for a methodology meeting of the Goals, Processes and Indicators of
Development project of the United Nations University, Bucharest, 1981).
[text]
- Anthony Judge. Patterns of N-foldness; comparison of integrated
multiset concept schemes as forms of presentation (Paper for a meeting
on forms of presentation of the Goals, Processes and Indicators of Development
project of the United Nations University, 1980). [text]
- Some hundred concepts of human development which people consider meaningful are
presented in Union of International Associations, Encyclopedia
of World Problems and Human Potential, K. G. Saur Verlag, 1990, 2 vols. It includes concepts legitimized by
the psychological and psychoanalytical establishments as well as promoted by various
contemporary movements and coming from religions and belief systems of different
cultures.