"Indicators and Information Systems for Sustainable Development" is a report co-authored with hartmut-bossel and published by the sustainability-institute. It addresses one of Meadows's central practical concerns: if systems can only be managed using the information that flows through them, then what we choose to measure determines what we can govern — and most societies were measuring the wrong things.
The Measurement Problem
The report begins from a systems-thinking premise: feedback-loops require information. Balancing loops in particular need accurate signals about the state of stocks and flows to generate corrective action. When the signals are absent, delayed, or measuring the wrong variables, balancing-feedback-loops cannot function, and systems drift toward overshoot-and-collapse.
GDP, Meadows argued, is the paradigmatic example of a misleading indicator. It aggregates economic activity without distinguishing between activities that deplete natural capital and those that build it. A society consuming its forests measures the timber sales as income; a society investing in renewable energy may show lower near-term GDP. The indicator actively obscures the stocks-and-flows dynamics that matter for sustainability.
Framework for Indicator Selection
Working with hartmut-bossel and drawing on the balaton-group's international network, the report develops a framework for choosing sustainability-indicators that capture the health of the systems being managed rather than proxies that are easy to measure but informationally misleading.
Key principles include:
Context
The report contributed to a broader movement in the 1990s toward alternative economic accounting — green GDP proposals, the Genuine Progress Indicator, the Human Development Index. Meadows brought a systems dynamics perspective to this conversation that complemented the work of herman-daly on ecological economics.
The indicator framework developed here connects directly to the leverage points hierarchy in leverage-points-paper-1999: changing the flow of information in a system (leverage point 7) is among the more powerful interventions available, and measuring the right things is the precondition for that.