Keywords

1 More Than Numbers?

In June 2021, the artistic director of the London Biennale, Es Devlin, transformed the courtyard of the Somerset House into the ‘Forest for Change’: visitors were taken through a journey into the forest, where they walked around to discover the United Nations’ Global Goals for Sustainable Development—more commonly known as the SDGs. The SDGs represent the UN’s ambitious goal-setting agenda to eradicate poverty, inequality and climate change. According to the Biennale’s website, when preparing for the show, Es Devlin was told that trees had been forbidden from the courtyard at Somerset House when the building was originally conceived 250 years ago. Es decided to ‘counter this attitude of human dominance over nature, by allowing a forest to overtake the entire courtyard’ (London Design Biennale, 2022). In subverting the rules of Somerset House’s Enlightenment-era designers, Devlin and her team considered the transformational power of nature to create real change: ‘The UN Global Goals offer us clear ways to engage and alter our behaviour and it is our hope that an interaction with the Goals in the forest will be transformative’ (London Design Biennale, 2022).

As the planet’s climate continues to deteriorate and the world slowly emerges from a lethal global pandemic, the SDGs are indeed representing a transformational moment for humankind and the ways we choose to live in this world. This book focuses on this transformational potential and attempts to understand how and why the SDGs’ monitoring agenda is as unique as it has become ubiquitous. How have a set of goals and a list of indicators captured the imagination of artists and campaigners, of activists and policymakers? What is it about the SDGs that have come to represent a different way of doing things both in measurement and in policy terms?

Indeed, the SDGs have become a constant feature of our daily lives as they are implemented by a variety of organisations—from governments to universities, the private sector and civil rights organisations. As we will explore in this book, this omnipresence of the SDGs is emblematic not only of the power of this particular initiative but also of the changing nature of the politics of numbers. In analysing the hegemony of the SDGs and the changing nature of numbers that govern, we are confronted with the question: what makes the SDGs any different from existing technocratic measurement tools and thus worthy of detailed analysis and attention? This book offers a view on quantification in public policy that goes beyond looking at its specific tools and effects. We argue that the power of numbers has gone further than that: quantification has become not only a way of steering action in global public policy, but rather it has emerged as the key process of creating spaces for governing, participation and measurement. As such, quantification has evolved from being the mere ‘bricks and mortar’ of governance to become its infrastructure itself—or, what this book calls, the ‘epistemic infrastructure’ of global public policy.

The notion of the epistemic infrastructure aims to capture the political work of numbers in creating connections between actors, constructing new frameworks of thinking and doing in policy and ultimately becoming the carrier of a new governing paradigm. The infrastructural lens on measurement in global public policy allows us to explore not only the metrics themselves but also the socio-political environments which enable their political effects. As such, the focus here moves from the well-established idea of ‘governing by numbers’ (Miller, 2001; Scott, 1998) to the focus on ‘governing numbers’ and the ‘governing of numbers’ as a key mode of producing policy knowledge and a unified global space to govern. Numbers do not merely influence the knowledge that governs action; rather, as we will show, quantification emerges as a new global public policy paradigm that shapes and reshapes the very architecture of transnational governance. As we will show, in recent decades, this new architecture of transnational governance has coalesced around the concepts of ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’.

2 Sustainable Development and the Rise of Sustainability Politics

How did it come about that ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ became the central governing principles of the ‘first truly global policy agenda’, the SDGs (UNGA, 2015)? As this book will show, in both explicit and implicit ways, the SDGs built on and departed significantly in substance and form from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs—agreed upon by 189 UN member states with the Millennium Declaration in 2000—and their 60 indicators were widely critiqued as driven by a small number of powerful political entities (the United States, Europe and Japan) in order to effect change exclusively in poor countries (Amin, 2006; Saith, 2006). For 15 years, the MDGs largely defined development priorities for multilateral, bilateral and philanthropic organisations in the Global South, creating a donor-led vision of global progress. For this reason, although the MDGs were widely heralded for highlighting poverty reduction and social development as the most important development problems of the new millennium, they were also criticised for being ‘reductionist’ and for framing ‘development as a top-down approach to meeting basic needs, promoting a target driven strategy, and [de-contextualizing] from local settings’ (Fukuda-Parr & McNeill, 2019, p. 8).

On the contrary, from the beginning, the 2030 Agenda with its Sustainable Development Goals was designed to be country driven. With this priority in mind, the SDGs were developed through two parallel consultancy processes, the Secretary General-run ‘Post-2015 Development Agenda’ and the Open Working Group (OWG), that emerged from the Rio+20 Conference on the Environment and Development. The ‘MDG plus’ that was to emerge from the UN-led ‘Post-2015 Development Agenda’ was conceived to be much the same as that which came before, while the OWG was much more revolutionary in the ‘structural change’ of the country-led coalition, which called for working towards issues of ‘poverty, environmental sustainability, economic development, and social equity’—going far beyond a focus on ‘basic needs’ (Fukuda-Parr & McNeill, 2019, p. 9). Thus, it became very important that the SDGs were country-led, and that the UN agencies that had been in the driver’s seat for the MDGs give up the wheel for countries to lead the process. Fundamentally, the SDGs replaced the MDGs’ poverty agenda with an agenda for ‘sustainable development’ (Fukuda-Parr, 2016).

Productively, in the past few decades in the UN space, ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ have become generatively vague terms. There is no question that the SDGs have their origin in the Rio+20 conference in 2012, meant to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development—the ‘Earth Summit’ (Dodds et al., 2012; Dodds et al., 2017). The Rio Earth Summit was the culmination of a movement towards global attention towards and prioritisation of protecting the environment from unsustainable modes of economic development, first codified in 1987 in a report by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), also known as the Brundtland Report or ‘Our Common Future’. In her forward to the report, Chair Gro BrundtlandFootnote 1 emphasised that the environment had to be accompanied with a rethinking of the concept of development. Development could not be conceived of as ‘what poor nations should do to become richer’ when it was clear that ‘many of the development paths of the industrialized nations are clearly unsustainable’ (WCED, 1987, p. 7), thereby introducing the concept of ‘sustainable development’ to solve this quandary.

Some authors argue that the goal of sustainable development, as defined in this highly influential text, was always to ‘reconcile the conflicting goals of environmental protection and economic growth’ and proclaim a ‘utopia of a society where no obvious concessions are necessary’ (Quental et al., 2011, p. 16). Conversely, Gasper et al. (2019) argue that the concept of sustainable development has changed in subtle but important ways since the Brundtland Report, which followed in the path set out by the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. While the authors of the Brundtland Report argued that ‘growth was necessary to reduce global poverty’, they also emphasised ‘the imbalance between consumption patterns of the wealthy and the poor’, making space for consumption to be a key issue to addressing sustainable development (Gasper et al., 2019, p. 84). However, over the decades since the report, the issue of the volume of consumption became less of a standalone issue and was increasingly conceptualised alongside production, with the ultimate conclusion that protecting ‘the environment and aspiring to unendingly higher levels of consumption for everyone are not seen as contradictory’ (2019, p. 85).

Irrespective of whether this ambiguity about what counts as ‘sustainable’ existed from the origins of ‘sustainable development’ in the Brundtland Report or not, the concept of sustainable development is certainly a highly malleable one. Fred Gale argues that ‘not only does sustainability encompass economic, social and environmental components but that, in seeing to integrate these components into existing approaches, political economists of all persuasions interpreted it as compatible with their established conceptions’ (Gale, 2018, p. x). Ironically, for example, ‘sustainability’ can come to be compatible with ‘sustained economic growth’ for neoclassical economists (Aznar-Márquez & Ruiz-Tamarit, 2016), while also be flexible enough to be used in environmental activist discourse that fights against such conceptions of growth. As we will see throughout the book, this ambiguity about what counts as ‘sustainable’ placed the responsibility of actualising ambitious goals about thinking concurrently about the environment, the social and the economic—the three pillars of the SDG agenda—on the shoulders of national and UN statisticians, who had to concretise the SDGs’ goals and targets into measurable indicators. But how come measurement has acquired such a central positioning in the production of global public policy? The next section will grapple with this issue before moving on to discuss the notion of ‘epistemic infrastructures’ and what they entail.

3 Quantification in Global Public Policy: From Governing by Numbers to Epistemic Infrastructures of Measurement

Sociologists and anthropologists of quantification observed that ‘our lives are increasingly governed by—and through—numbers, indicators, algorithms and audits and the ever-present concerns with the management of risk’ (Shore & Wright, 2015; 23; see also influential work by Merry, 2011; Sauder & Espeland, 2009; Strathern, 2000). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the literature on the history, politics and social effects of quantification has burgeoned over the last decades (e.g. Alonso & Starr, 1987; Desrosières, 1998; Espeland & Stevens, 2008; Hacking, 1990, 2007; Porter, 1995; Power, 1997; Rose, 1999). Global governance is particularly susceptible to the ‘seductions’ of quantification (Merry, 2016), as this field relies on the availability of easily comparable and universalising forms of knowledge (Rottenburg & Merry, 2015). Hansen and Porter (2017) suggest that, although it took scholars a long time to recognise the constitutive nature of discourse, we are now well aware of the role of language in shaping reality. However, they suggest that numbers are characterised by additional qualities that make their influence much more pervasive than words. These elements are order, mobility, stability, combinability and precision. Numbers transform complex issues into readily auditable objects (Power, 1997) that are subject to political rationalities (Miller, 2001).

The predominant focus of this vast body of scholarship is on analysing quantification as a set of tools that incites different institutional and political responses (Espeland & Sauder, 2007; Espeland & Stevens, 2008). This focus on the specific effects that metrics ought to produce leads to processes of ‘reactivity’ (Espeland & Sauder, 2007) or even ‘gaming’ in order to fit the expected organisational and political scripts for action (Bevan & Hood, 2006; Strathern, 1997). More recently, there is a growing recognition that the power of quantification goes beyond its effectiveness and ubiquity as a set of tools to govern. Quantification is seen instead as a ‘logic’ (Chun & Sauder, 2021) or a ‘culture’ (Mennicken & Espeland, 2019; Merry, 2016) on which actors draw in different institutional and bureaucratic settings. As such, quantification is a carrier of broader political, social, cultural and institutional orders. Therefore, quantification is more than just numbers—rather, it is the central machinery of promoting specific modes of governing, such as evidence-based governance, and as such is inherently paradoxical as a logic of governance, as argued by Merry (2016, p. 11):

Governance by indicators can increase egalitarian decision making and accountability by opening up the basis for decisions to public scrutiny. On the other hand, it can also reinforce inequality and evoke resistance among the governed.

This book follows this line of inquiry by exploring the processes and practices of quantification through the analytical lens of epistemic infrastructure. A social theory interest in infrastructures first emerged in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature (Bowker, 1995; Star & Ruhleder, 1996) in order to describe the mix of materials, practices and meanings that comprise interlinked knowledge structures, generating effects and structuring social relations. In the context of sustainable development, the concept of epistemic infrastructures is particularly useful for capturing the emergence, processes and consequences of the ways in which quantification has scaled up, linking different sites of calculation and governance. This analytical lens allows for theorising quantification as a meta-level phenomenon that governs not only through its explicit political effects but rather through creating structures, connections and interdependencies, thus allowing for new governing spaces to emerge.

At the same time, even though the concept of ‘epistemic infrastructures’ is becoming increasingly prevalent in global public policy literature (e.g., Bueger, 2015), it is often used in a vague and under-theorised way. Building on our use of the term elsewhere (Tichenor et al., 2022), this book aims to unpack this term by proposing a theorisation of an epistemic infrastructure of measurement within the SDGs as an interplay of three levels: the materialities of measurement, interlinkages between actors and measures and finally new paradigms of doing global public policy.

The materialities of measurement are the building blocks of the epistemic infrastructures. Just as the physical infrastructures are built from bricks, metal and concrete, epistemic infrastructures are constructed with data, indicators, surveys, reports, data visualisations, etc. Within the SDGs, these materialities entail the complex system of goals, targets and indicators that allow for constructing the concept of ‘sustainable development’ in practice. This epistemic infrastructure did not emerge all at once; rather, it was built on the existing foundations—the Millennium Development Goals as well as the decades-old statistical systems of the UN countries. Within the SDGs, these materialities were linked together into a framework in the processes of negotiation and governing of the indicator system (as we show in Chap. 2). These fragmented assemblages of different measures and approaches required a process that would unify this wide variety of practices into a coherent global measurement—and consequently governing—programme. Here, the practices of harmonisation of data and metrics take the central stage as the key process of creating sustainable development as a global public policy programme. Through processes of harmonisation (as we discuss in Chap. 3), data and metrics produced by various means and across countries and institutions are transformed into global data and metrics—ones that allow for comparison, benchmarking and—more often than not—competition between countries. Importantly, numbers in the SDGs do not speak for themselves: instead, their meaning is built in context—and this meaning-making process occurs through narrativisation (Chap. 4). Numbers are transformed into political entities—ones that carry values, priorities and ideas that travel across different global and local communities—through the process of storytelling and narrative-making.

The second order of the infrastructure is the interlinkages through which these diverse materialities are connected and held together. Here, the central role is played by the epistemic communities, communities of practice and varied networks of experts. The key difference between the MDGs and the SDGs is the different approach to by governing numbers—the MDGs were a predominantly top-down process orchestrated by International Organisations. The SDGs (as we show in Chap. 5) were from the outset designed as a participatory programme with the country members leading the way. Consequently, the process of governing by numbers requires a large dose of negotiation and navigation of these emergent communities and networks. The epistemic infrastructure is maintained through interdependencies between these various actors (which we discuss in Chap. 6). Fuelled by both competition and collaboration, International Organisations configure and reconfigure epistemic communities around particular policy arenas, extending the terrain of the SDGs and thus of global public policy itself in the process. Further, the establishment and maintaining of the infrastructure through the interlinkages requires new forms of expertise. The experts working in this field are no longer merely statisticians and data scientists: increasingly what is needed is a new form of experts—expert brokers (Chap. 7) whose main role is creating and managing the connections between different disparate groups of political actors—the governments, the National Statistical Offices, International Organisations, the third sector and community groups, academia, etc. The proclaimed aim here is for the process of producing numbers to not only represent a technocratic exercise in measurement but also facilitate a democratic process of negotiating the common epistemic order established through quantification. This effort, that is, to inject the technical process with political clout and give it democratic credentials, is at the heart of building the epistemic infrastructure and hence the core analytical question for this book: in other words, what happens when the production of numbers is proclaimed and used as the key venue for democratic decision-making amongst global leaders in their efforts to steer the future?

This book examines this new status quo, facilitated by the SDGs, as the foundation of a new global public policy paradigm. In the process of collecting the data for this book, one of our interviewees stated—somewhat provocatively—‘there is no global policy, apart from the climate policy’. As we will argue in this book—the SDGs have not only generated a global public policy programme by challenging the ways we think about what global policy is and how it is practised; they have also created the measurement and governing architecture to bring it to fruition. The SDGs are the new paradigm for two reasons: first, they have reshaped the idea of ‘sustainable development’, making it an ‘all encapsulating’ concept that unites nearly all policy fields; second, measurement has become the central way of thinking and doing sustainability.

Central to this book is the key role of the production of quantification as one of the primary tools of governing the transnational. The book builds on the literature on the making of measurement infrastructures (Merry, 2019) to argue for the rise of global public policy as an epistemic infrastructure: as it will become evident in the chapters of this book, we see global public policy as not merely the outcome of ‘governing by numbers’ (Miller, 2001). The book moves beyond a theorisation of global policy as the top-down steering of policy action at the national level through the application of soft governing tools, such as indicators and benchmarking. As we will show, instead of examining policy change as the side-effect of measurement processes, we will show how the epistemic infrastructure of the SDGs has become a crucial site for global public policy work: as the measurement space opens up to become an arena of deliberation and negotiation about policy goals and policy prioritisation, numbers do not merely count; they represent and embody policy directions and become the key venue of policy contestation and consensus.

4 Global Public Policy: A Fluid Concept and a Contested Terrain

The previous section discussed the emergence of global public policy as an epistemic infrastructure. Nonetheless, what does policymaking at the level of the global mean? For Ramesh Thakur and Thomas Weiss (2009), policy refers to the statement of principles and actions that an organisation is likely to pursue in the event of particular contingencies (2009, p. 19). It is different from norms and institutions, in that it is issue-driven: for example, in the question whether ‘UN policy’ exists, or indeed in whether the SDGs represent a policy framework or not, Evans and Newnham suggest that policy is not simply a set of governing principles, but reflects ‘…the decision to embark upon certain programmes of action (or inaction) in order to achieve desired goals’ (1998, p. 440). Following this definition, ‘policy-makers’ are actors participating in such processes. Yet, a sharp distinction is often made between national/domestic and foreign policy, the latter being the lens most often used for understanding the participation of national actors in intergovernmental decision-making (Thakur & Weiss, 2009).

Diane Stone (2008) contributed substantially to the discussion of the nature and function of global public policy, by questioning the role of states as key actors in policy formulation; she suggested that global public policy is a multi-centric, transformative, complex global political system with multiple issue-regimes to govern contemporary global challenges. She emphasised the need to re-conceptualise the global public policy space as a global agora, to pay greater attention to the interactions between public and private actors as well as the role of knowledge producers in shaping the field. In a similar vein, Reinicke (1998) saw the role of networks as key in the production of global public policy in that they are effective at bringing together different groups of actors and finding common solutions to common problems. According to him, global public policy networks ‘govern without governments’. These networks achieve this ‘by placing new issues on the global agenda; negotiating and setting global standards; gathering and disseminating knowledge; making new markets where lacking or deepening markets that are failing; and innovating implementation mechanisms for traditional intergovernmental treaties’ (Reinicke, 1998, p. xv).

Indeed, most scholars of global public policy agree with the premise that the world is increasingly globalised and interdependent (Nagel, 1990; Soroos, 1986; Stone, 2008). Benner et al. (2003) write that ‘since the early 1990s, the driving forces of globalisation, technological change and economic and political liberalization have fundamentally transformed conditions for effective and legitimate governance’ (2003, p. 18). More importantly, scholars argue for the significance of studying global public policy not as an add-on to national policymaking, but as an important space where governing decisions are taken, decisions that affect national politics, too:

An agenda of global problems can be identified. Elements of an international policy process have been in place for at least several decades. Policies containing regulations and programs have been incorporated into treaties and resolutions. Finally, steps have been taken to implement and review the policies that have been adopted. The nature of contemporary world politics cannot be adequately understood without knowledge of these cooperative efforts at global problem solving. (Soroos, 1986, p. 374)

To date, literature has been dominated by a range of approaches for understanding the production of global public policy. According to Brinkerhoff, the partnership approach refers to ‘a dynamic relationship among diverse actors, based on mutually agreed objectives, pursued through a shared understanding of the most rational division of labour based on the respective comparative advantages of each partner’ (Brinkerhoff, 2002, p. 325). On the other hand, perhaps the most common and dominant way of studying global public policy has been through a focus on network formation:

Global public policy networks build bridges across different sectors and levels, bringing together actors from governments, international organizations, civil society, and business…Unlike traditional hierarchical organizations, these networks are evolutionary in character and flexible in structure. They bring together disparate groups with oftentimes considerably varying perspectives, combining knowledge from different sources in new ways to result in new knowledge. (Benner et al., 2003, p. 18)

Related to the rich literature to the rise of networks in global governance is the study of transnational advocacy networks which coordinate action around a ‘principled issue’; they create links and rally around the convergence of a range of actors, from civil society, to states, IOs, global philanthropists, business and others in creating momentum for policy agenda setting on key global issues (Keck & Sikkink, 1998). International relations theorists have written persuasively about the rise of regimes in global public policy, and the ways that different regimes, such as human rights, humanitarianism, development and security, overlap and intersect in order to create a governing complex that requires inter-institutional cooperation at the transnational level (Betts, 2009). Finally, a key approach to the understanding of global public policy is through the emergence of norms: Thakur and Weiss suggest that norm-setting is a key function of global public policy, since ‘if policy is to escape the trap of being ad hoc, episodic, judgemental, and idiosyncratic, it must be housed within an institutional context’ (2009, p. 20). As we outline in the book network formation and practices of expert brokering are crucial for constituting the global public policy of the SDGs and constitute the second-order level of the epistemic infrastructure. We build on this existing rich literature of global public policy by focusing on how the governing of numbers in these global spaces has become the privileged mode of producing unified, concretised policy on the global level.

5 Research Design

This analysis has been based on a project funded by the European Research Council (grant number: 715125, Principal Investigator: Sotiria Grek), ‘International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field’ (or METRO for short). The project draws on a rich set of mixed-methods data, including analysis of documents, semi-structured interviews with the key experts in International Organisations and Social Network Analysis of meetings. Overall, this book draws on a rich dataset of over 80 interviews with key experts in these epistemic communities, as well as the careful analysis of documents, including flagship reports, policy and strategic documents (such as declarations, position papers and action plans), internal documents produced by IOs (including meeting agendas, open consultations and PowerPoint presentations) and research articles published by actors in these networks.

The research design was grounded in a comparative case study of different policy fields, examining the SDGs as a whole, but also focusing deeper on the cases of education (in particular SDG 4), poverty (SDG 1) and statistical capacity development (cutting across all the SDGs). In the examination of the SDGs as a whole, we also conducted document analysis and interviews around the policy fields of health, migration and sustainable tourism.

First, in relation to the education goal (SDG4), it was produced in a context of increased datafication in education governance as the prime mode of knowing and reforming complex education systems around the world. The rise of large international assessments created a wealth of statistical information and thus allowed states and transnational agencies for the first time to construct comparative knowledge about education performance. Thus, SDG4 promises to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’ (United Nations General Assembly, 2015, p. 14). The SDG4 represents the single biggest attempt to bring together a vast array of actors and countries in order to construct universal education indicators, as well as to decide on the appropriate methodologies and data sources. Like all SDGs, it is a country-led, global exercise—led by UNESCO but with the collaboration and close involvement of all major International Organisations (IOs).

Through an in-depth analysis of texts and interviews, this case study explores the conundrum of securing accountability of this global performance monitoring project through ensuring the objective validity of its measurement tools, whilst promoting the democratic and equal participation of all actors. UNESCO, as the custodian agency of SDG4, has a double accountability obligation to participating countries: firstly, the robust and objective monitoring of progress towards the SDG4 goals, and secondly, the participatory and democratic, equitable process in which all member countries have a voice and stake in the project. As a result, although the UNESCO Institute of Statistics has been significantly reinvigorated in relation to its statistical capacity, it has also put great emphasis on the participatory, inclusive and consensual aspects of the agenda.

Secondly, the project focused on the ending poverty goal (SDG1) as one of the key challenges of sustainable development. The realisation of this goal is most commonly—both discursively and materially—linked to the production of high-quality poverty knowledge. At the same time, the quantification of poverty knowledge is strongly contested. The UNICEF Innocenti report describes the measurement of poverty as a ‘crisis in monitoring’ (2015). Indeed, there has been profound disagreement and controversy around the measurement systems of poverty—both in the academic and policy worlds. One of the factors accelerating this crisis is the increase in the number of approaches to measurement promoted by International Organisations. Just in the last twenty years, the number of global measures of poverty increased from one (the popular dollar-per-day International Poverty Line introduced by the World Bank) to eight different monetary and multidimensional approaches.

This case explores—through document analysis and semi-structured interviews—the dynamics of poverty governance in the situation in which multiple measurement approaches compete. In the face of the multiplicity of different measures, International Organisations employ various strategies to assess, create and communicate the epistemic, political and strategic values of poverty indicators. Consequently, the process of measurement—and the controversies around it—is a domain of navigating different legitimating forces.

Last but not least, METRO examined statistical capacity building in depth, as representing one of the SDGs (SDG17), but also being the key driver of change in regard to the development of the agenda as a whole. In the process of monitoring the MDGs, the lack of data in many countries or sub-national regions was highlighted as a problem that development agencies must put on their agendas. This lack of official data was particularly stark in the face of the rapidly changing technology landscape that has led to a ‘data revolution’ in many parts of the world, which has constructed elaborate alternate data and meta-data collection systems alongside official statistical systems. With these needs and inequalities in mind, United Nations member states and IOs put emphasis on the development of statistical capacity in the Global South and incorporated it as an indicator for monitoring within SDG17. Simultaneously, statistical capacity development is also presented as necessary for the functioning of the global sustainable development agenda in its entirety, maintaining and creating the infrastructure for the 231 unique indicators to be monitored by custodian UN agencies.

Based on interviews with key figures within IOs, network analysis of advocates of statistical capacity development, and critical discourse analysis of key texts, we investigated the debates and processes of developing global consensus on principles and standards for statistics, statistical systems, and their development, including in the part of the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs), the UN Statistics Division, and others. At the heart of these debates is the tension between the ‘empowering’ or ‘democratic’ nature of data—to ‘make people count’—and the work of creating universal standards for measurement, as well as tensions between different practices of statistical estimation and representation.

6 Book Summary

The book begins with an attention to the production of indicators and their harmonisation for the SDG framework in Chaps. 2 and 3: governed by carefully defined protocols and networks, the SDGs’ 231 unique indications have been deliberated, chosen and refined for inclusion, making each indicator a microcosm of the knowledge and policy practices that fuel the epistemic infrastructure as a whole. Chapter 4 moves on to discuss the role of narrative-making in the making of the epistemic infrastructure: through the intertwinement of numerical, discursive and visual narratives, we show the significance of story-making for giving the numbers ‘heart and soul’.

The book proceeds to focus on the interlinkages of actors, materialities and processes in the production of the epistemic infrastructure: Chap. 5 focuses on the tense politics of ensuring democratic and technocratic accountability, and thus shows the work of numbers in producing venues for policy production. Chapter 6 moves on to examine the role of networks and meetings: it shows the generative potential of conflict and failing metrics as a way of keeping the infrastructure going, always expanding and moving into new territories. Chapter 7 examines the politics of producing expertise in such a complex, sometimes even chaotic, field: the central role of the experts in IOs in the process of governance of the SDGs lies not solely in providing technical guidance but rather in the mediation and brokerage between actors and fields. As such, the legitimacy and effectiveness of experts rely on their ability to mediate connections, create and communicate common meanings of problems and integrate multiple bodies of knowledge.

Finally, we conclude the book (Chap. 8) with a discussion of the rise of global public policy as an epistemic infrastructure: we show the ways that the SDGs as a monitoring and governing agenda have transformed the role of quantification, not as merely the facilitator and enabler of policy decisions taken elsewhere, but as the prime site of governing the future itself.