Beyond GDP, Beyond Measurement: Towards Collective Intelligence for a World of Interconnected Systems

This week, as governments, scientists and international organisations gather in Paris for the first Global Conference of the International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development (IDSSD), one question sits at the centre of the global sustainability agenda: How should societies measure progress? At the same time, the recent United Nations Beyond GDP report has renewed international attention to developing measures that better reflect wellbeing, justice, environmental sustainability and peace. Together, these developments invite us to move beyond asking what societies should measure and towards a more fundamental question: why societies measure in the first place.

The answer extends well beyond monitoring performance. Every important public decision is made under conditions of uncertainty, and measurement helps reduce that uncertainty by transforming observations into evidence for action. Indicators guide resource allocation, inform policy, evaluate interventions and enable societies to learn from experience. Measurement is therefore not an end in itself. It is part of a continuous cycle through which societies observe, interpret, learn, adapt and improve.

Seen from this perspective, the Beyond GDP agenda represents much more than an effort to replace one set of indicators with another. By broadening the conversation to include wellbeing, justice, environmental sustainability and peace, it moves the global debate decisively in the right direction. Yet it also exposes an important gap. The debate continues to focus primarily on what societies should measure. The equally important challenge is understanding how measurement itself can strengthen learning, adaptation and better decision-making.

If the purpose of measurement is learning rather than accounting, then indicators are more than numbers describing current conditions. They are observations that help societies reduce uncertainty, evaluate whether interventions are working, revise assumptions and improve future decisions. Their value therefore lies not only in what they measure, but in how they improve judgement, strengthen governance and enable collective action.

This distinction becomes increasingly important in a world shaped by accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss, technological disruption and geopolitical instability. Static dashboards can tell us where societies are today, but they reveal far less about how societies will respond as conditions change. They measure outcomes. They do not necessarily reveal capacities.

This distinction between outcomes and capacities represents, perhaps, the next frontier of the Beyond GDP agenda. Traditional indicators measure the state of society at a particular moment in time. They tell us whether people are healthier, wealthier or more secure than before. Yet they say comparatively little about whether societies possess the institutional capability, governance systems, social cohesion and adaptive capacity required to navigate future uncertainty. In an increasingly dynamic world, understanding these capacities may prove just as important as measuring present outcomes.

There is another reason why this distinction matters. Indicators such as poverty, peace, wellbeing and justice are not independent properties of society; they are outcomes produced by the interactions within social, economic and ecological systems. Their meaning therefore depends on how the system itself is defined. A national indicator, for example, captures dynamics within a national boundary, while many sustainability challenges—from river basins and food systems to climate adaptation—operate across multiple, overlapping scales. Understanding what an indicator tells us, therefore, requires not only measuring the outcome but also understanding the system that produces it.

Peace provides a useful illustration. Contemporary measurement frameworks understandably assess peace through indicators of conflict, violence and security. These remain indispensable. Our own cross-country analysis confirms that more peaceful societies generally exhibit stronger institutions, higher adaptive readiness and better environmental performance. Peace, governance and adaptive capacity are closely related. Yet this relationship is far from uniform. Countries with broadly similar levels of peace can differ substantially in their preparedness for future shocks. Some possess much stronger institutional capability, implementation capacity and environmental resilience than others. 

Measuring today's peace therefore tells us something important about current conditions, but much less about the capacities that enable societies to sustain peace in an increasingly uncertain future. This variation should not be dismissed as statistical noise. Rather, it reflects the fact that observed outcomes emerge from different social, institutional and environmental systems. Similar levels of peace may therefore conceal very different capacities for learning, adaptation and transformation. Understanding these differences requires looking beyond the indicator itself to the systems, relationships and capabilities that generate it.

The same reasoning applies to wellbeing, justice and environmental sustainability. These are often presented as outcomes to be achieved, yet they also depend upon capacities that are continuously built and renewed. A society's ability to respond to drought, recover from floods, manage shared water resources, strengthen public trust or integrate emerging technologies cannot be inferred solely from current indicators. These capabilities emerge through continuous learning, institutional adaptation and effective governance.

Future measurement systems must therefore be capable of working across multiple scales, linking local realities with national and global perspectives. Rather than treating indicators as isolated statistics, they should help reveal how capacities emerge, interact and evolve within interconnected systems. In other words, the next generation of indicators should measure not only the state of society but also its capacity for transformation. Alongside measuring wellbeing, justice, peace and environmental performance, they should also help us understand how societies learn, coordinate, adapt and transform. Such capacities determine not only how societies perform today but how effectively they respond to the uncertainties of tomorrow.

The Beyond GDP movement has already transformed the global conversation by encouraging governments to measure what matters. The next step is to ensure that measurement itself becomes part of society's capacity to learn. Indicators should not merely record performance; they should strengthen judgement, improve decisions and support continuous adaptation. In an increasingly uncertain world, progress will depend less on the sophistication of our dashboards than on our collective capacity to transform evidence into wiser decisions, stronger institutions and more resilient relationships between people and the Earth.

This is precisely the direction in which sustainability science now needs to evolve. Rather than developing another global indicator framework, the challenge is to build systems that continuously integrate scientific evidence, local knowledge and practical experience into better decisions. The objective is not simply to understand the world more accurately, but to help societies navigate complexity, manage uncertainty and accelerate transformation.

The Asia Science Mission was established to put this vision into practice. As one of the International Science Council's Science Missions for Sustainability and an endorsed programme of the United Nations International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development (2024–2033), the Mission explores how scientific evidence can move beyond describing problems to strengthening society's capacity to learn, adapt and transform. Rather than asking only what should be measured, it asks how scientific evidence, local knowledge and systems thinking can be integrated to support better decisions under conditions of uncertainty.

Across its demonstration initiatives, the Mission is testing how scientific evidence, local knowledge and systems thinking can be integrated across different scales from communities and landscapes to national policy to identify implementation pathways, strengthen adaptive capacity and accelerate transformative change. In doing so, the Mission seeks not only to improve what societies measure, but also how knowledge is connected across scales to support collective learning and better decisions.

The challenge is therefore not simply to develop more indicators, but to develop measurement systems that recognise how outcomes emerge from interconnected systems operating across multiple scales, and that help societies learn collectively as those systems evolve.

As the international community begins to imagine what comes after the Sustainable Development Goals, the next frontier is unlikely to be another generation of indicators alone. It will be the development of institutions and knowledge systems that enable societies to learn continuously from evidence, adapt intelligently to change and strengthen their collective capacity for transformation. The journey beyond GDP is therefore only the beginning. The more important journey is towards societies that transform measurement into collective intelligence, using evidence not merely to describe the world, but to continuously learn how to shape a more resilient, peaceful and sustainable future.

The ASM is supported by the ISC Regional Focal Point for Asia and the Pacific, which is funded by the Australian Department of Industry, Science and Resources and led by the Australian Academy of Science. The five-year programme (2023-2028) is working to ensure that regional needs and priorities are adequately represented in the International Science Council’s global agenda on issues of major importance to both science and society.