Evidence-Based Policymaking as Practice: The Politics of Knowledge and Expertise in the Production of Global Poverty Indicators

Ending poverty is one of the key challenges in global governance. The realisation of this goal is most commonly – both discursively and materially – linked to the production of high-quality poverty knowledge. The standards of quality of such knowledge are closely linked to the governing paradigms employed by International Organisations (IOs), which are prioritising specific evidentiary standards in decision-making. Consequently, international poverty knowledge is quantified, highly technical and relies strongly on objectivity as the core epistemic tenet. Despite a growing body of research pointing to the centrality of the International Organizations as the producers of evidence in global governance, the micro-sociological examination of knowledge production within the IOs is limited. This study addresses this gap by exploring the practices involved in the construction of poverty indicators by the World Bank, UNDP and UNICEF. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with experts and analysis of key strategic documents, this paper aims to explore the politics of poverty knowledge in global governance. It does so through an interlinked inquiry into three themes: 1.) discourses and practices of evidence-based policymaking in global social policy; 2.) economisation of knowledge production and the evidentiary standards; 3.) translation of knowledge between the global standard-setting and local data-production levels. By employing the analytical lens of the STS literature on the science-policy interface, the paper contributes to the literature by proposing a theorisation of poverty indicators as ‘sites of co-production’ where different forms of knowledge and power coalesce.