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IPS169 Markku L.
• State support for ‘civic vigilance’ and constructive mistrust and
distrust. This could take the form of technical and financial support
to civil society organisations for their efforts to hold official
statistics production and producers accountable, but also support
for organisations producing radically alternative types of indicator
framings, relying on official or alternative data sources. Experience
from radioactive waste management policy can provide examples
of this kind of support.
• Opening up the processes of indicator design, use, and refinement
to participation by a broad range of actual and potential user and
stakeholder groups, with a view to maximising the range of
normative and cognitive perspectives involved (cf. Ràfols et al.
2012; Ràfols 2019).
• Actively seek critical discussion concerning the underlying framings
and methodological choices underpinning indicators, in order to
highlight the associated uncertainties and the importance of
framings on the shape and impact of indicators. This could help
resist “the law of inherent conservatism in official statistics” and
foster “statistical entrepreneurship”, by enhancing the double role
of statistical offices as producers of reliable, authoritative and
incontestable facts, and as reflexive innovators enlightening the
society of the complexities and uncertainties behind statistics, and
exploring their practical significance (Van Tuinen 2009, 441). An
option might be the kind of inclusive deliberation that associates
truth claims (indicators) with the issues of public value and
purpose, which Jasanoff and Simmet see as the prerequisite of
acceptable truths. As such, they could an antidote against the
problems placed – in their view erroneously – under the banner of
“post-truth”.
• Conduct analysis amongst actual and potential users and the wider
public in order to identify and minimise risks of dysfunctional
distrust, engendered in particular by feelings of disappointment
and betrayal (cf. Lenard 2008).

References
1. Agacinski, D. 2018. Expertise et démocratie: faire avec la défiance. France
Stratégie. Décembre. www.strategie.gouv.fr
2. Algan, Y. & Cahuc, P. 2007. La société de défiance. Editions ENS rue
d’Ulm.
3. Algan, Y., Cahuc, P. & Zylberberg, A. 2012. La fabrique de la défiance...
Et comment s'en sortir. Paris: Albin Michel.

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