ABSTRACT
Numbers, as well as words, can be used as markers around which to debate the meanings of water security. Where agreement can be reached, numbers can be used as guides by decision makers and to assess progress towards common goals. This is especially the case for indicators—in effect, the headline numbers into which larger amounts of data are distilled. But as Molle and Mollinga (2003) have pointed out in relation to indicators of water poverty and scarcity, while the distilling and simplifying power of indicators is essential to their utility, it also carries risks. In the messy business of shaping public policy or business strategy, indicators can appeal as shortcuts to empiricism, compared with costly context-based research. Too often, this means that indicators can obscure as well as disclose meaning, and value judgements through which one variable is selected over another are glossed over. Even where those judgements are revealed, there commonly lurks an ‘information iceberg’ of data and statistics below an indicator (Jesinghaus, 1999) with which audiences are rarely able to engage.
