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COLLAGES OF BETTERMENT 211implication is that these indicators will be inaccessibleand incomprehensible to the general public. In thiscontext, it is unlikely that indicator development wouldenable social and political learning, whereby socialvalues and a normative understanding of sustainabilityare enhanced and empowered to move social actions.Within this context, the usefulness of a sustainabilityindicator system as a tool of governance follows thetraditional function of information in governance,that is, information is used to define and ‘control’ theemerging policy area of sustainability. With the guidinglogic of technical appraisal, indicators will be more usefulfor providing baseline information to guide governmentdecisions, and less as a tool for communicating withvarious stakeholders. In the Philippine case study,it seems plausible for NGOs to provide alternativeenvironmental statistics, albeit modest in sophisticationand quality. This raises the question of what is stoppingmore members of civil society from replicating such aninitiative.As with most developing countries in the world,Indonesia and the Philippines are still encumberedby the inadequacy of ecological data to developnational level indicators. Indicator systems demanda strengthened capacity in innovation systems andscientific infrastructure. At a basic level, this entailsan improvement in data acquisition and assimilation,especially the operating technology of data pooling,calibration and archiving. In theory, a strong sciencebase enables indicator development to reach theprocessing and application stages, transforming datatranslation and mediation into indicators amenablefor use. In policy systems such as Indonesia and thePhilippines, where the base of science is weak or at anearlier stage of development, the utility of indicators islimited to pointing to areas where more informationis needed, compromising the potential to steer actualpolicy change. As a result, the translation and mediationof sustainability indicators into a negotiation spacewhereby official information is debated and contestedby civil society are therefore negated. Due to the highinvestment needed in developing this capacity, nationalgovernments in cooperation with donor agencies arelikely to dominate efforts to develop indicators in thenear future. More severely, the existing trend couldpersist whereby governments dominate information andcivil society thrives on issues. International benchmarkswill continue to play a mediating role, with the MDGas an example.Conclusions and ImplicationsDisconnect and disjuncture are the hallmarks of moderngovernments. This is especially true for a relativelyyoung policy area such as sustainability. When theconceptual logic is still ambiguous, measurement willsuffer accordingly. In theory, liberal societies suchas Indonesia and the Philippines ought to be morereceptive to developing and using indicator systemscompared to a conservative society such as Malaysia (seeHezri 2005). The success of embedding sustainabilityindicator systems into the decision-making fabric iscontingent upon the nature of interactions between stateand society. The more liberal the nature of interactionis, the more possible it becomes for a sustainabilityindicator system to be a useful tool for governance; thatis, if indicators are made available in the public domain,they will allow civil society to provide political feedbackto decisions made by governments. Moreover, the twinprocesses of democratization and decentralization inboth countries offer further promises for the widespreaduse of sustainability indicator systems. These alone are,however, insufficient to effect significant changes inIndonesia and the Philippines as far as sustainabilitypolicies are concerned. Indeed, a policy-resonantindicator system is a function of robust science andcredible policy processes requiring a strong scientificunderpinning and a solid institutional basis. Thefollowing three strategies are imperative to promotingsustainability indicators as a tool for governance:1. The scientific infrastructure and innovation systemof both Indonesia and the Philippines should becontinuously developed. The existing technologicalcapacity in both countries to monitor the environmentusing tools such as remote sensing, geographicalinformation system (GIS) and modelling is stillunderdeveloped. The uptake of these technologiescould be enhanced not just by higher research anddevelopment (R&D) allocation, but also by couplingthem to long-term ecological monitoring initiativeswhich will provide appropriate data for indicatordevelopment. This strategy could pacify polemics arisingfrom a data-poor debate such as the present claim ofIndonesia being the world’s third largest net emitter ofcarbon dioxide;2. An unambiguous coercive government structure,be it formal or informal, is desirable to enableinformation and indicators to move across scales asneeded. Indonesia could emulate the Philippines inestablishing a coordinating agency/committee whichis not separated from the mainstream decision-makingprocess. To institutionalize indicator assessment, bothAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows