After a two days meeting in Bangkok, at the end of October, the statistical experts of the UN agencies have come with a controversial list of 159 “generally agreed” indicators to measure the Sustainable Development Goals approved last September by the UN.

Traditionally, development agencies have tried to summarize in a single indicator or index complex development goals. Thus, UNICEF emphasized infant mortality as a proxy indicator of its mandate to protect children, the World Bank has traditionally equated development with per capita income, and UNDP enriched that idea with its Human Development Index based on a larger but still reduced set of indicators. Those single figures were considered to correlate so closely with other relevant indicators (for example infant mortality correlates with child underweight) that they were considered as useful to represent broad trends, progress or regression, in realities that everybody understood as being complex.

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