ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book. The book is about quantitative measures and their role in public decision-making. It addresses the twin questions of how to design indicators that can be useful to policy and how to design processes to make better use of such information. The intended purpose of making a measurement then has to play a role in the process of designing it, and the design process becomes part of a political process. In fact, for successful indicators there is an interaction between design and use, and therefore such measures can and should evolve over time, and, when used for public decisions will often be controversial as they represent a particular perspective and theory. The design of an indicator and its environment interact in other significant ways as well.
