Recommendations and Encouragements

IRES uses two distinct terms of art to grade the force of its normative statements, and the distinction governs how every “it is recommended” or “countries are encouraged” statement in the document (including every row of Table 1.1 across all eleven chapters) should be read:

• “Recommended” refers to a standard with which countries should comply.
• “Encouraged” indicates a desirable practice that is not part of the standard as such.

[IRES, Ch. I, para. 1.50, PDF p. 28, 2018]

For issues relevant to compilers and users of energy statistics but not explicitly covered in IRES, countries are encouraged to develop their own treatments and clearly document them in their metadata [IRES, Ch. I, para. 1.50, PDF p. 28, 2018].

Implementation is circumstance-dependent

Regardless of grade, IRES’s recommendations “should be implemented by countries in a way appropriate to their own circumstances, including identified user needs, resources, priorities and respondent burden” [IRES, Ch. I, para. 1.49, PDF p. 28, 2018]. Additional practical/technical guidance (good practices, country case studies) is deferred to the forthcoming Energy Statistics Compilers Manual (ESCM), envisaged to be updated more frequently than IRES itself [IRES, Ch. I, para. 1.49, PDF p. 28, 2018].

Revision governance

The IRES updating process is a recurrent, well-organized procedure: editorial amendments and clarifications beyond dispute are UNSD’s responsibility, while any substantive change is discussed with countries and relevant working groups before being endorsed by the United Nations Expert Group on Energy Statistics (EGES) and submitted to the United Nations Statistical Commission for adoption [IRES, Ch. I, para. 1.51, PDF p. 28, 2018].

Tracking coverage across chapters

Table 1.1 (IRES, Ch. I, PDF pp. 24–28) enumerates the main recommendations and encouragements from every chapter, paragraph by paragraph. Because most of those chapters are not yet ingested, the rows are tracked in meta/recommendations-tracker.md, with each chapter’s ingest expected to flip its own rows from pending to ingested.

Related

• Official Statistics — the concept most immediately built on a recommended/encouraged provision (Box 1.1, paras 1.17–1.22)
• International Recommendations for Energy Statistics — the document whose provisions this distinction governs