Quantifying global public policy: actors, perspectives, contradictions and futures

Abstract

In the last few decades, global governance has increasingly been shaped by the numbers used to determine progress and success on shared goals. These measurements have become proxies for countries’ general wellbeing and prosperity, and they have become the means by which different entities – multilateral and bilateral funding organisations, nongovernmental and philanthropic organisations, and individual countries themselves – make priorities about development investments both internationally and domestically. This increased entanglement of indicators and development goals has led to what some have called ‘governance by indicators’ (Davis et al. 2012). The Sustainable Development Goals and their affiliated indicators, debated and introduced in 2015, have not only sped up this process of the quantification of governance, but they have also led to new relationships, new interdependencies, and new practices of governance that require innovative research and analysis. The proposed panel aims to examine the production of global public policy as a metrological field, shaped and continuously reshaped through the governing work of the SDGs and other major performance measurement agendas. More specifically, through a focus in a range of policy arenas, the panel will cast light on the accelerated trends in quantification in order to explore how ‘governing by goals’ steers the production of knowledge for policy. The quantification of global challenges, such as equitable education for all, poverty eradication and the right to healthcare, attract an ever-growing number of actors, from all levels of governance alike. This posits the International Organizations in a dual role – of coordinators of the SDGs but also enablers of country participation and buy-in into the sustainability agenda. This phenomenon, bound to increase further as global challenges persist, presents us with a conundrum that will be at the crux of the intellectual debate in this panel: whilst the complex quantitative architecture of the measurement goals renders the political work behind their production more and more obscure, the SDGs are the first participatory -‘democratic’ for some- global monitoring programme that is led by the countries involved. The panel aims to explore the interesting tension between fabricating inherently political numbers, whilst proclaiming governance via ‘data democratisation’. Thus , the panel invites papers that explore the production and effects of global metrics and their affiliated methodologies; the major global actors that are in charge of these instruments, and their collaborations and clashes; the rise of new discourses around data democratisation and statistical capacity development; the effects of major events, like the global pandemic or the climate crisis, on the production of new measures of growth and social progress; and the anticipated futures of the global metrological field and its impact on social transformations.

Title	Details
Custodians of Sustainable Development: Does global governance fragmentation hinder coordination for the SDGs?	View Paper Details
Private Actors and the Production of Metrics in Global Health	View Paper Details
Technocratic frontstage, democratic backstage? Participatory practices in the production of poverty indicators	View Paper Details
Talking SDGs: the role of narratives in the global governing by goals	View Paper Details