Technocratic frontstage, democratic backstage? Participatory practices in the production of poverty indicators

Governing global poverty has in recent decades become synonymous with measuring it. The standards of international poverty knowledge, set largely by the International Organisations establish it as quantified, highly technical and relying strongly on objectivity as the core epistemic tenet. Correspondingly, the literature on ‘governance by numbers’ predominantly focused thus far on the processes of rationalisation of governance and technocratic modes of accountability. However, the practices of indicator production are increasingly becoming – due to the crisis of the rationality project and trust in traditional forms of expertise – a sphere of participation and public engagement. In these emerging contexts, production of indicators is becoming a tool of empowerment and contestation of governments’ politics. By focusing on the democratic modes of quantification in global governance, this paper proposes an outlook on the production of indicators as a participatory process of de-objectification of measurement. It does so through a qualitative case study of the production of multidimensional poverty measurement between key IOs (the World Bank, UNICEF and UNDP), local government agencies and civil society in selected developing countries. The paper explores the politics, epistemics and praxis of production of metrics by employing the Goffmanian dramaturgical approach to the debates on co-production and democratisation of science. As such, it offers a new theorisation of the process of quantification as driven by the inherent duality in which the technocratic frontstage of global knowledge standards is contrasted with democratic backstage of local practices where multiple epistemic frameworks and types of knowledge coalesce.