Governance Indicators and the Broken Feedback Loop
This chapter presents an overview of the role of communications in governance indicators and discusses challenges to understanding whether, how, and why their intended audiences use or fail to use rankings, indices, and related data. These include long-standing challenges associated with ensuring that information meets the needs of different target audiences, engaging with traditional media, and using rankings to present indicators. As new technologies have changed information flows and dynamics, new challenges have emerged, including echo chambers and data graveyards. The chapter shows a broken feedback loop between governance indicator creators and their intended users that can be traced to the understanding of communications as an accessory activity, without integrating user research and frank self-assessments into the indicator creation cycle. More research should be conducted about the extent to which the current offer of indicators is meeting users’ needs and the extent to which underlying theories of change remain valid.