Public Praxis Forum

By Dyuti Khulbe

Few ideas shape public life as quietly, and as profoundly, as measurement.

Governments measure economic growth. International organisations measure development. Universities measure research performance. Civil society organisations measure participation. Climate scientists measure emissions. Human rights organisations measure violations. Every year, new reports, rankings, indices, and scorecards attempt to tell us how countries, institutions, and societies are performing.

These measurements often shape decisions that extend far beyond the reports themselves. Governments use them to guide policy. Donors rely on them when allocating funding. International organisations use them to monitor progress. Journalists use them to explain the world. Over time, numbers become rankings, rankings become headlines, and headlines begin to influence how societies understand themselves and one another.

We rarely stop to ask a more fundamental question.

What exactly are these measurements measuring?

Perhaps more importantly, what are they unable to measure?

This is not an argument against indicators or data. Modern institutions could not function without them. Measurement allows governments to allocate resources, organisations to evaluate programmes, researchers to identify patterns, and societies to compare progress across time and place.

The challenge lies elsewhere.

Every system of measurement begins with a series of choices. Someone decides what should be counted, how it should be counted, which indicators matter, and what falls outside the frame. These decisions are often technical, but they are never entirely neutral. They reflect assumptions about what progress looks like, what counts as evidence, and what institutions consider important enough to measure.

Perhaps that is why measurements so often generate public debate. Not because numbers are inherently misleading, but because no measurement can fully capture the complexity of the realities it seeks to describe.

Why Institutions Measure

Modern societies generate an extraordinary amount of information. Governments need to understand unemployment, school enrolment, inflation, public health, infrastructure, migration, and countless other aspects of public life. International organisations compare progress across nearly two hundred countries. Development agencies decide where resources should be directed. Human rights organisations monitor violations across regions and over time. Without some form of measurement, these tasks would be almost impossible.

Measurement, therefore, is not simply about numbers. It is about making complex realities understandable enough for institutions to make decisions. Indicators allow governments to identify patterns, researchers to compare trends, and organisations to monitor whether policies are producing the outcomes they intended. In many ways, they provide a common language through which institutions communicate with one another.

This is one reason why indicators have become so influential. They do not merely describe the world; they help institutions organise it. Budgets are allocated, priorities are set, and policies are evaluated through frameworks that depend on measurable evidence. Whether discussing poverty, education, climate change, public health, or governance, institutions require ways of translating enormously complex realities into information that can be compared, monitored, and acted upon.

In this sense, measurement solves a genuine institutional problem. No government can make decisions based solely on individual experiences. No international organisation can compare the circumstances of different countries through anecdotes alone. Numbers, indicators, and statistical frameworks make large-scale governance possible.

Yet this is also where a more interesting question begins to emerge.

Before anything can be measured, institutions must first decide what is worth measuring.

And that decision is rarely as neutral as it first appears.

Every Indicator Reflects a Choice

Indicators often appear objective because they are expressed through numbers. Numbers carry a certain authority. They seem precise, comparable, and detached from opinion. Yet long before any data is collected, a series of decisions has already been made.

Someone decides which questions deserve asking. Someone determines what success should look like. Someone chooses which variables matter, how they should be weighted, what counts as reliable evidence, and which realities fall outside the framework altogether.

Measurement, in other words, begins long before the first number is recorded.

These choices are not necessarily arbitrary or made in bad faith. Many emerge from decades of research, institutional practice, international cooperation, and methodological debate. But they also emerge from particular historical moments, policy priorities, technological capacities, and ways of understanding the world.

This is why indicators should not be understood as neutral reflections of reality. They are frameworks through which reality is organised and interpreted. Every framework highlights certain aspects of public life while leaving others less visible.

Over time, these frameworks become remarkably influential. Once an indicator is widely adopted, it begins to shape not only how institutions measure progress, but also how societies imagine progress itself.

A country’s development becomes associated with one set of indicators rather than another. Educational success is increasingly discussed through measurable outcomes. Governance becomes a score. Happiness becomes an index. Human rights become recommendations, reports, or rankings.

None of these measures are inherently meaningless. The question is whether we sometimes mistake the framework for the reality it was designed to describe.

When Indicators Become Reality

Indicators are often introduced as tools for understanding the world. They help institutions organise information, compare experiences across countries, monitor change over time, and evaluate whether policies are working as intended. In that sense, they solve a genuine institutional problem.

Over time, however, something else begins to happen.

The indicators themselves start influencing the realities they were originally created to describe.

Governments celebrate improvements in international rankings. Universities adapt their priorities to perform better in global league tables. Cities compete for sustainability scores. Development agencies increasingly design programmes around measurable outcomes because indicators shape funding decisions, institutional credibility, and political priorities.

Measurement no longer simply reflects reality.

It begins to influence behaviour.

This observation is not entirely new. In Seeing Like a State, political scientist James C. Scott argued that states often simplify complex societies in order to make them more legible and therefore more governable. Whether one agrees with all of Scott’s conclusions or not, the broader insight remains remarkably relevant: institutions often require simplified representations of reality before they can act upon it.

The philosopher Alfred Korzybski expressed a similar idea through one of the most quoted phrases in modern philosophy:

“The map is not the territory.”

A map helps us navigate the world. It highlights certain features while leaving countless others aside. No one expects a map to contain every tree, conversation, or lived experience.

Indicators work in much the same way.

They are not reality itself. They are representations of reality, designed to help institutions navigate enormously complex societies.

Problems begin when the map slowly starts replacing the landscape.

A country’s development becomes associated with a ranking. Educational quality becomes reduced to examination performance. Governance becomes a score. Happiness becomes an index. Institutional success becomes a collection of measurable targets.

The indicator gradually becomes more visible than the reality it was originally designed to represent.

Whose Understanding of Progress?

Once we recognise that every indicator reflects a series of choices, another question naturally follows.

Whose choices are they?

This is not a question of accusing particular institutions or dismissing decades of research. Most global indicators have been developed through extensive collaboration between researchers, governments, international organisations, and statistical experts. They exist because societies genuinely need ways of understanding complex realities.

Yet no framework emerges in isolation.

Every indicator is shaped by particular historical moments, institutional priorities, technological capabilities, and assumptions about what progress looks like. Before something can be measured, someone must first decide that it matters.

For many societies, measures such as income, educational attainment, life expectancy, or institutional effectiveness capture important dimensions of development. But they do not necessarily capture everything that communities themselves may understand as progress.

Can belonging be measured?

Can trust?

Can cultural continuity?

Can dignity?

Can relationships with land?

Can communities’ sense of safety?

Can historical justice?

Can ecological balance?

These questions become particularly important when globally accepted indicators are presented as universal measures of success.

Economist and philosopher Amartya Sen famously argued that development should not simply be understood as economic growth, but as the expansion of people’s capabilities and freedoms. Around the same time, scholars such as Arturo Escobar questioned whether dominant models of development reflected universal aspirations or particular historical experiences that gradually became global norms.

Although they approached the question differently, they were asking something remarkably similar:

Who decides what progress looks like before the rest of the world begins measuring it?

Postcolonial and decolonial scholars have continued expanding this conversation. Rather than rejecting measurement itself, many have questioned whose knowledge becomes institutional knowledge. Which experiences become recognised as evidence? Which ways of understanding well-being enter global frameworks? And which remain difficult to see because they were never included in the framework to begin with?

The question, then, is not whether one understanding of progress is right while another is wrong.

It is whether any single framework can ever fully represent the extraordinary diversity of how different societies understand a good life.

What Gets Left Outside the Frame?

Perhaps you’ve experienced this yourself.

Every year, new global rankings are published, measuring everything from happiness and democracy to corruption, development, education, peace, innovation, and governance. Almost inevitably, some results leave people puzzled.

A country facing prolonged conflict appears unexpectedly high on one ranking. Another that seems politically stable performs poorly on another. Public debate usually follows the same pattern:

“How can this possibly be right?”

These reactions are often dismissed as emotional or uninformed.

Perhaps they shouldn’t be.

Sometimes public scepticism reveals something important.

Not necessarily that the data are wrong, but that people instinctively recognise the gap between measurement and lived reality.

That gap deserves to be taken seriously.

Indicators often acquire an authority that extends well beyond what they were originally designed to capture. Rankings begin to shape headlines, policy debates, funding priorities, and international reputations. Over time, a country’s position on an index can become shorthand for understanding an entire society.

Yet societies are not rankings.

No index can fully capture what it feels like to live through conflict, experience discrimination, trust public institutions, feel politically represented, or imagine a hopeful future. Some realities resist quantification not because they are unimportant, but because they are fundamentally difficult to translate into comparable variables.

This raises a more uncomfortable question.

When institutions cannot measure something, what happens to it?

Does it receive less policy attention?

Less funding?

Less political urgency?

Less international visibility?

History suggests that what institutions can measure often becomes easier to govern, compare, finance, and communicate.

The reverse can also be true.

Experiences that resist measurement may gradually become harder to prioritise, not because they matter less, but because they fit less comfortably within institutional frameworks.

This is perhaps where postcolonial and decolonial critiques become especially valuable.

Many scholars have argued that the issue is not simply whether indicators are technically accurate. It is also about asking whose realities become measurable, whose knowledge becomes institutional knowledge, and whose experiences remain difficult to recognise because they do not fit established categories.

The challenge, then, is not merely improving indicators.

It is continually questioning the assumptions on which they are built.

Every framework illuminates certain realities. Every framework also leaves others in the shadows. The question is whether we remain aware of both.

Featured photo by Evangeline Shaw on Unsplash