Talking SDGs: the role of narratives in the global governing by goals

This paper will examine the case of narrative-building around the preparations and establishment of the SDG 4 – the education SDG. Although quantification has been at the heart of shaping the debate on global goals in both the Millennium and the Sustainable Development Goals, the role of language and particularly narrative-making has not been investigated in depth. Yet, narratives are key in enveloping and making sense of the data overload; they give numbers meaning and soul. As Shore et al. argue, policies are ‘productive, performative and continually contested. A policy finds expression through sequences of events; it creates new social and semantic places, new sets of relations, new political subjects and new webs of meaning’ (2011; 1). It is therefore pertinent to examine the construction of the SDG4, not only as a new measurement agenda comprised of metrics and quantitative data, but also as the construction of a new ‘policy world’: a new space of political processes, interactions and governing paradigms that becomes consolidated through the use of language and inscription. The paper follows the interpretivist paradigm of policy analysis to reveal global public policy as a messy and fluid governing space that cannot be examined through the application of instrumental, normative and ideal-type flowcharts of policy making, portraying it as a process that flows seamlessly from conception to implementation. Rather, we see policy as the construction of new narratives about novel imaginings of the world that continuously move and change across time and borders. Methodologically, this paper will focus on the tracing and emergence of narratives in ‘small sites that open windows onto larger processes of political transformation’. (Shore et al 2011; 12).