Creating Very Real Imaginary Worlds: The Case of the Environmental Performance Index

The use of quantitative tools as a technology for comparing and forecasting a wide array of issues, as well as guiding policy formulation has increased over the last decades. This increase has been across most of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with multiple tools either forecasting violence, ranking the quality of education or measuring land protection. Regardless of the issue that is measured, most tools will share its dependency on quantitative datasets and skills on statistical programming to manage it. In contrast, assumptions and statistical process publicly available as a process of accountability and replicability, very little is known about what happens while quantitative tools are being produced. Through interviews or document analysis, it is possible to know a posteriori why individuals and organisations took certain decisions. However, there is a lack of ethnographic approaches analysing how quantitative tools are not the result of a rigid statistical process but everyday mundane actions, decisions and discussion usually left outside of the public document. As Hannerz (2003) suggested, it is only by “being there…and there… and there…” that the micropolitics (Nast and Pile 1998) of an organisation can be known. An ethnographic approach of how quantitative tools are daily produced could allow a greater comprehension of the ethos this kind of tools carry in them. A possibility is that while dealing with the multiple discrepancies across quantitative datasets, producers acknowledge that their tools are not a representation of a world that ever existed, but an imaginary world result of an assemblage of how the world was indifferent moments, representing when and how data was collected. This paper aims to discuss, how is it that organisations that are producing quantitative tools, create “imaginary worlds” as a result of dealing with quantitative data. In particular, in the realm of environmental issues. This discussion will be done by presenting some preliminary findings of a participant observation conducted during the production of the Environmental Performance Index (EPI). The EPI is a benchmarking tool measuring the quality of national environmental policies in over twelve issue-categories (e.g. air quality, water management, forests). This index has been produced by Yale and Columbia universities for over twenty years. By spending five months not only observing but becoming a member of the team, it was possible to learn how quantitative tools not only rank and measure but assemblage multiple understandings of nature, environment, and sustainability embodied within their datasets. Also, an essential element is the time discrepancy between multiple databases. In sum, the production of quantitative tools is far from being the result of automated statistical processes. By conducting a participant observation at a research centre, it was possible to acknowledge the importance of mundane acts. It is through unrecorded events, that producers give an ethos to these quantitative tools. Although methodologies are publicly available, it is through internal discussions, reflections, choices and interests that tools create a world and not another.