Dashboard Device for Navigating Development

Ranjit Devraj

Navigating the development seas can be a hazardous enterprise for your ordinary activist, who faces neo-colonialist pirates armed to the teeth with all manner of ready-to-fire data.

But no more. The WSF saw the presentation of well-crafted web-based tools with enough firepower to knock holes into the best arguments put forward by those who still hide behind GDP growth and other 'precise' figures.

As its name suggests, the 'Dashboard Tool' looks like the instrument cluster on a car's dashboard and mercilessly indicates where each country stands as far as development. And it is available not only for the activist but also for the ordinary citizen or voter.

Not that development or economic indicator projects are new. Institutions such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank and the European Commission have had them for some time now, but many wonder: do these tools have some sort of spin?

After all, there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics.

One of the people who devised the Dashboard Tool, Jochen Jesinghaus of the European Commission, said that in today's information age the citizen's right to be informed is hampered not so much by a lack of information as by the surfeit of it.

To those trying to steer their way through the avalanche of schedules at the WSF or other international conferences, Jesinghaus' observation must have struck a whole orchestra's worth of chords.

The Dashboard Tool (http://iisd1.iisd.ca/cgsdi/intro_dashboard.htm) has credibility because it was developed by a small group of indicator programme leaders known as the 'Consultative Group on Sustainable Development Indices' (CGSDI), is an attempt to help and launch the process of putting indicators at the service of democracy.

And the needles on the dashboard go beyond the conventional indicators of GDP growth, unemployment and inflation.

'Relying on just the three indices is like saying that as long as there is fuel on board and the compass is pointing in the right direction everything is going fine,' Jesinghaus said.

The Dashboard Tool handles more than a hundred economic, social and environmental indices borrowed from the United Nations Commission for Sustainable Development and the four-cluster model of Agenda 21, said Roberto Brambilla of the Italy-based Rete di Lilliput, sponsor of the Dashboard.

Yet another tool presented at the WSF is the Ecological Footprint Accounts, which brushes aside all the confusing indicators to focus on humanity's relentless demands on nature, which have since the 1970s surpassed the biological limits of growth.

According to Jerome Sayre of Redefining Progress, the US-based non-profit group behind Footprint, until the 1970s humanity was mostly living within the biological regenerative capacity of the earth - a bit like living off the interest on a bank deposit. Now, however, we are digging deep into the original deposit.

He adds the sobering thought that this is happening when the biologically productive area of the earth that can actually support life is only 25 percent.

In too many countries the demand for ecological capacity exceeds its biologically productive area and these countries are actually running a national ecological deficit - the classic example being the United States, which uses its economic power to import and satisfy its high exorbitantly high consumption rates.

Sayre said that until Footprint came along there was no reliable and comprehensive way to evaluate progress towards sustainability - a fact convenient to industrialists who see the concept of sustainability as a mere nuisance.

Footprint and the Dashboard are there for those interested in the truth but need it in a hurry.