Despite many progressive and people-centered initiatives for the development of official statistics (such as data values, inclusive data charter, data for now, and citizen data collaborative), the key global action plans for the development of statistics in the past two decades (Marrakech in 2004, Busan in 2011, and Cape Town in 2017) do not propose a single action aiming to increase citizens’ participation, including their cognitive inputs, into the production of official statistics. This paper argues that the current language of “evidence-based decision-making” provides inadequate scope for the international statistical community to discuss solutions that give agency to people and non-state institutions to influence “what” statistics and “how” should be produced and disseminated on the social realities that they actively and persistently construct. The paper provides a sociological model for official statistics based on the social reality construction theory and describes how the new understanding of official statistics as social stabilizer can influence our approach towards the development and assessment of statistical systems.
