Scripting the SDGs: The Role of Narratives in Governing by Goals

Abstract

One of the central qualities of the ‘political work’ of numbers in global governance is the fact that they can rarely persuade by themselves; instead, we always find them in need of constructing persuasive narratives of crisis, development and progress. This chapter explores the way in which number achieve their political goals through three types of narrative-making practices: through the use of visuals, the application of discourses and through storytelling. As we argue in this chapter, these practices are not ‘add-ons’ but rather are inherently interlinked with the numerical practices. As such, this chapter tends to the ways in which numbers and their stories are mutually constitutive to enable popularisation of numbers, increase their political capacity and enable participation in the process of ‘governing by numbers’.

1 Introduction

Global public policy relies on technocratic governing tools that describe policy priorities using the language and logic of metrics. For some time now, notions such as the efficiency and quality of different policy choices, as well as ideas around regulation and accountability of policy arenas, have been newly reformulated as quantitatively measured entities, made known and available for monitoring and scrutiny by metrics. As the previous chapters have already eloquently shown, comparability of progress, peer pressure and goal-setting have become the primary tools in global governance (Davis et al., 2012).

Nonetheless, despite the central place of metrics in these governing efforts, the translation of goal-setting and numerical thinking into narratives has always been key in adding logic, meaning and sentiment to their cold rationality. Here, we follow Morgan and Wise (2017) to suggest that narrative ‘coherence-making’ is essential to the fragmented and heterogeneous global governance environment, since narratives are the ordering materialities via which stories are made. These stories ‘reveal’ and ‘unfold’ events, meetings, actors and processes over time and place through creating interrelationships: all these material manifestations, written up in executive summaries, PowerPoint presentations, speeches and many other types of texts, uphold the epistemic infrastructure of the SDGs by giving it ‘heart and soul’. They are the ‘glue’ that sticks the infrastructure together, that gives it past, present and a future destination. For what is sustainable development, if it is not a story: a story that might have put up divides in the past between the narrators and the narrated, but that now claims that it can also unify and bring together, even momentarily, those who were previously—politically, epistemically or ideologically—conflicted and apart.

Often, the literature is juxtaposing the qualitative formats such as discourses and quantitative forms such as numbers (Porter and Hansen, 2012). In this chapter we challenge this duality (akin to Stone, 2020; Bandola-Gill and Smith, 2021) by exploring different types of narratives in the SDG context. As we will illustrate in the case study of the SDG4, here the narratives might take on a form that is canonically associated with these forms: discursive storytelling of emergency and delay but also stories of the bright utopic future when the goals are realised. However, narratives of the SDGs are shaped beyond words—many of them are also numerical, built around the construction of goals and indicators, whilst others are primarily visual, using the medium of the image to travel and become embedded in the everyday realities of the people they intend to address: not only policymakers but also citizens themselves. Thus, narratives should not be examined as separate from number-making; on the contrary, we see numerical data as key in the construction of narratives about the fabrication of ideal worlds via quantified knowledge. Narratives, through bringing together discursive, numerical and visual elements, become powerful materialities of persuasion and consensus-making. As has been shown by the rich literature in policy and organisational research (McBeth et al., 2012; Radaelli, 1999; Roe, 1994; Czarniawska, 1997), narratives are powerful political tools as they construct and evaluate policy problems and solutions, identify key stakeholders and—perhaps most importantly—offer an interpretative lens on the current political issues which allows to make sense of them and identify potential courses of action. As we will show in this chapter, this narrative-making process in global public policy is both material and multimodal: it facilitates both the stability and the fluidity of the epistemic infrastructure through the interplay between discursive, numerical and visual narratives.

For example, an indicator, in the shortest and simplest form of narrative-making, is not simply a number, but a discursive, numerical and visual story of past, present and future progress. The SDGs, from the start, created the 17 goals and a visual branding that became key in unifying them as a single agenda. The SDG logo, in particular, emphasises the focus on setting such a future agenda, with quantifiable targets, while the colourful wheel highlights both the separation of the goals and their unity (Chart 1).

Chart 1

The SDG Poster. Disclaimer: The content of this publication has not been approved by the United Nations and does not reflect the views of the United Nations or its officials or Member States. For more information on the SDGs, please visit https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/.

It is not simply the visual branding that renders text and images key in communicating the message. The combination of the discursive, visual and numerical is vital in the building of individual indicators, too, and in the ways these indicators are presented in PowerPoint presentations, sent as email attachments and generally being shared via physical or digital means. The 4.1 SDG indicator¹ is a telling tale of the ways that indicators combine declarative language with the specifics of proportions, time frames and visual imagery to create a narrative of future education (Chart 2).

Chart 2

The SDG 4.1 indicator

This chapter will discuss the case of the education SDG (SDG4), as an example of narrative-making in the production of the SDGs. In order to understand how the SDG4 came into being, this chapter uses elements of Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) analysis, applied through an Interpretative Policy Analysis (IPA) lens. Although heavily criticised as taking an almost post-positivistic approach to the study of narratives (Jones & Radaelli, 2015), NPF still offers useful tools to unravel the constituent parts of narrative-making. IPA, on the other hand, is useful here as counter-force to the linearity of the NPF explanation and as a useful sensor to the less discernible, but equally forceful elements of myth-making, central in the bridging of narratives and in creating new global norms (Fontdevila, 2021). The next section will explain some of the core principles of NPF and the ways that IPA creates useful ‘correctives’ to such an analysis. We will then move on to the examination of two key texts from the period of preparations towards the production of the SDG4; these are the Muscat Agreement (2014) and the Incheon Declaration (2015). Next, the analysis will turn to a discussion of an education data visualisation, produced for the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), the key custodian agency of most SDG4 indicators: this is the Left Behind: Girls education in Africa visualisation, showing gender education disparities in some of the world’s poorest regions. Finally, this chapter will offer a discussion of the role of narratives in shaping new governing norms for global public policy, as well as the close relationships and interdependence of governing narratives with the production of a—mythical—global consensus. As we will see, data visualisations are increasingly used by large International Organisations in their attempts to reach out and make their work appealing and meaningful for donors and countries alike.

2 The Narrative Policy Framework Analysis: Principles, Methods and Criticisms

Narratives are a common form of human cognition; we understand the world around us through stories, and it is stories we use in order to explain our own worlds to others. According to Burke (1973), narratives are ‘equipment for living’; they represent stories that have a narrator, a plot and protagonists who are heroes, villains or victims. They often involve a resolution or create counter-narratives and lead to unexpected new beginnings. We grow up with stories, as they are an essential part of the make-up of traditions, of histories, of nations, of our personal trajectories and of artistic creativity itself.

Although many of these observations are fairly commonplace, it is less well-known how narratives are useful in making sense of numbers but also in politicising them in order to achieve specific governing effects. As the visualisation of data over the last few decades has manifestly shown, one of the most powerful communication devices for discussing evidence and numbers are, in fact, stories. There are two main reasons for this: first, narratives become the prime space where numbers are given meaning, and where numbers can be translated into new policy directions (Stone, 2020). Second, according to Espeland, ‘analysing the narratives that indicators evoke help us to better understand the effects of quantification’ (Espeland, 2015; 61). Paradoxically, one of the major effects of ‘narrating indicators’, as Espeland argues, is the erasure of narratives in favour of further processes of commensuration:

Indicators are appealing partly because they simplify complex organisations and processes in order to produce public, authoritative knowledge that makes them appear legible to outsiders. This simplification takes many forms but one way to characterise it is to understand it as the erasure of narratives: the systematic removal of the persons, places and trajectories of the people being evaluated by the indicator and the people doing the evaluation. (Espeland, 2015; 56)

It is this erasure of narratives in the making of numbers that necessitates the need for the construction of new ones. New narratives are necessary to replace ‘old’ understandings and practices with new re-imaginings and possibilities—the ones that only numbers can create and foster. This is the reason narrative-building is key in quantification; apart from becoming the ‘inscribed knowledge’ that is ‘written down in texts, or represented in pictures and diagrams’, numbers narrated in text form have become the only viable way to govern (Freeman & Sturdy, 2014). Historically, the examination of narrative form in social sciences can be traced in many disciplines: for example, narratives in marketing research were seen as an expert instrument in constructing narrative advertising techniques (Mattila, 2000). In the fields of communication (Morgan et al., 2001) and psychology (Green & Brock, 2000), it was proven that the greater the immersion in a story, the more persuasive its communicative power. Neuroscientists showed the importance of storytelling in individual autobiographical memory and self-conception (see Mar, 2004).

Despite such analyses of narrative-making in a range of disciplines, Jones et al. (2014) in The Science of Stories suggest that public policy was slow to acknowledge narrative-making as an essential aspect of the production of knowledge and governing effects, although they do refer to earlier work that focused on narrative analysis from an interpretivist perspective; these were authors like Emery Roe (1994), Fischer and Forester (1993) and Maarten Hajer (1995). Indeed, during the 1990s and in the early 2000s, a number of scholars focused on the role of narratives in shaping policymaking (Berman, 2001; Bleich, 2002; Goldstein & Keohane, 1993; Schmidt & Radaelli, 2004). These authors emphasised the role of ideas in the making of public policy, by showing the ways that policy problems do not always emerge from objective facts and rational interests, but often draw on ideational resources. They, therefore, inserted a significant new element in our understanding of the making of policy stories: that is, the insertion of the argumentative approach in policy analysis. According to Fischer, ‘whereas a narrative ties together a story with a beginning, a middle and an end through the device of a plot, an argument is structured around premises designed to logically lead to conclusion’ (Fischer, 2003; 181). Thus, both Fischer (2009) and Gottweis (2007) argued that public policy and its narrative forms are not only about logos (rational discourse), but also about pathos (emotions) and ethos (ethics and values).

Finally, the complexity of resources that contribute to narrative-building was further exemplified through Boswell and her colleagues’ analysis, who stressed that, apart from the role of ideas, knowledge claims are also key building blocks that narratives draw heavily upon (Boswell et al., 2011); in their words, narratives have to have ‘a significant cognitive component which, we argue, creates its own dynamic’ (Boswell et al., 2011; 5). According to Boswell and her colleagues,

As scholars have argued, narratives need to meet certain cognitive criteria. They need to set out causal relations between actions and events (Banerjee 1998; Roe, 1994). We would add that in order to be compelling, they also need to be relatively coherent, consistent with available information, comprehensible, and -in the case of narratives that are scrutinised by researchers- to conform to quite strict criteria of scientific validity. (Boswell et al., 2011; 5)

In order to return to the elements of narrative construction, we will first review the NPF frame of the analysis of story-making. First, NPF proponents stress the need to distinguish between narrative form and content (Jones et al., 2014). In other words, narrative form refers to the structure of a narrative, while narrative content refers to the objects contained therein². In terms of form, narratives use elements that consist of a setting, characters, plot and moral of the story. In more detail, and largely following Jones et al.’s useful outline, here are some of the core elements of the making of narratives:

• First, all narratives need to have a setting. The setting is the specific context within which the policy narrative is played out: ‘in other words, the setting is the stage, and just like in most plays, people accept the stage as-is without too much thought’ (Jones et al., 2014; 6).

• Second, Stone (2002) and Ney (2006) suggest that stories always have protagonists: these are characters who are either heroes, villains or victims.

• Third, narratives always have a beginning, a middle and an end—this is the plot. Plots are essential in sequencing the story, in inserting causal chains of thought and events. Stone (2002, 2012) has suggested the existence of specific story types, depending on the twists and eventualities that the plot takes: namely, these can be stories of decline, stymied progress, or helplessness and control.

• Finally, narratives usually offer a specific moral; this is the key, ‘take- away’ message that the story culminates in (such as the ones we are going to examine below). The need for production of more knowledge and hence action is a commonplace moral.

Indeed, as the Introduction has already discussed, the SDGs are addressing some of the most complex, interlinked and compounded global challenges that the world currently faces. Therefore, the production of narratives that describe these very fluid and often dangerous phenomena is needed all the more; while trying to make sense of these emergencies, narratives also offer some (even momentary) stability and hope. Finally, narratives do not need to be precise; they thus offer added legitimacy to numbers, while masking data gaps and technical inaccuracies. According to Roe (1994; 51) a narrative stabilises ‘the assumptions needed for decision making in the face of what is genuinely uncertain and complex. They can be representationally inaccurate—and recognizably so—but still persist, indeed thrive’.

3 Scripting the Narrative of the SDGs

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 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’ (Shore et al., 2011; 1). It is therefore pertinent to examine the construction of the SDGs, 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.

Here, we find Barbara Czarniawska’s work very useful and especially in relation to her conceptualisation of organisational change and of the vital work that narrative-making does towards producing such change. Czarniawska made substantial contributions to the method of narrative analysis per se, showing its value in understanding organisations:

Watch how the stories are being made, for example, unfolding how leaders bring together temporality and causality to produce a plausible plot about the necessary course of a change process. Collect stories everywhere: in strategic documents, the boardroom, comics posted on office doors, or the elevator. Provoke storytelling by asking respondents to give their views of what happened first, second…, last, and why. And when moving from field to desk, interpret the stories by asking what people say; analyze the stories, asking how they say it; and deconstruct the stories, asking which perspective are they privileging and which they are silencing. And set narratives together with or against other narratives. It is then time to assemble your own story, and theorizing being plotting (Czarniawska & Löfgren, 2013), produce you own theory (Czarniawska, 2014).

One of the most interesting contributions of Czarniawska’s work has been her reading of William Tarde and his focus on imitation and fashion: ‘Imitation, claims Tarde, is the main mechanism of sociality, the main mode of binding people (and things) to one another’ (Czarniawska, 2004, p. 121). Imitation, according to her, is rarely imposed but happens through actors’ and organisations’ adherence to norms, that is, the things that people ‘normally’ believe and do. For Czarniawska, fashion is the engine of change: this is the setting of new trends that actors follow through the translation of new discourses in their organisational scripts. Translation in this context does not refer to the precise linguistic act of translating text, but rather understood as ‘displacement, drift, invention, mediation, creation of a new link that did not exist before and modifies in part the two agents’ (Latour, 1993; 6). According to her, the act of translation is key in the travel of global ideas; she suggests that the new idea, transformed into a buzzword, a model, a presentation or whatever form it may take, is acted upon at national and local policy sites according to need and contextual specificities.

This is the fundamental change that the SDG4 context has generated; building on decades of UN summitry script writing, the SDGs took advantage of a tradition already firmly established: that is, the use of large actor gatherings to explicitly commit and create goal- and target-setting narratives, as the new blueprint for countries to receive, adjust and follow. It is precisely this long tradition of UN work in mobilising public attention and creating new modish ideas for change, that, even in the absence of political consensus, has always sparked optimism in the potential of such large actor congregations—and consequently their declarations and stories—to produce substantial policy shifts. Indeed, despite their focus on initiating change, nothing is ever completely new in these conferences. According to Clark et al. (1998),

All UN world conferences share similar goals and formats. A central focus of official business at each conference and its preparatory meetings is the creation of a final conference document to be endorsed by state participants. At regional preparatory meetings, governments develop regional positions on specific conference issues. The additional meetings of the Preparatory Committee (PrepComs) are global rather than regional and focus particularly on drafting the conference document. The wording of the final document is invariably the focus of intense politicking among states and between NGOs and states, which continues up to and through the conference. (p. 8)

It is within this background that the narrative of the SDGs was constructed: however, there was also a shift, and one that would mark a sharp difference with all previous UN summitry work. Rather than merely focusing the discussions on the construction of declarations of shared aspiration, typically associated with UN summitry, goal-setting took centre stage. Indicators of progress constituted the bedrock of the new agenda, rather than an additional, technical issue that was only an add-on to the important work of official declarations. Returning to Czarniawska, it is this key operation of goal-setting work that makes the SDGs (and partly their predecessors, the MDGs) and their indicators carry an important discontinuity with previous UN summitry: the production of indicators, enveloped with the well-known declarative language of progress, represented the new modish agenda, able to travel, translate and adjust to national contexts as the new lingua franca of policy innovation and reform.

4 Narratives in and of the SDG4

The section will use two sources of empirical material for the examination of narrative and story-making in the context of the SDG4. It will begin with discourse analysis of two crucial documents in the emergence of the idea and goals of SDG 4, and it will then move on to the analysis of data visualisations, with a specific focus on their examination as storytelling. In presenting both the textual and the visual analyses of narrative and story-making, the aim of this analysis is twofold: first, it will show how through a series of major events and the publication of pivotal texts, such as ‘declarations’, large global ‘agreements’ and ‘frameworks for action’, the work of measurement is inscribed, materialised and made plausible by the production of strong, yet ambiguous, rhetoric of development, equality, democracy, universality and morality. If statistical data is all about possibility, narratives foster plausibility; they bring coherence and give sense to the informal and often random and fragmented global governing spaces. We will therefore examine how old and well-established ideas around global development and educational equity and progress are getting new momentum through the use of language that reframes them as large global-setting endeavours. Second, the aim of this analysis is also partly conceptual; the examination of data visualisations will show how the (re-)emergence of the SDG4 narrative requires the complementary work of storytelling to reach out to wider audiences, appeal to local contexts and sentiments and therefore reinforce the narrative in a continuous cycle of bolstering the reach and appeal of the targets themselves.

4.1 The 2014 Muscat Agreement

As indicated in the Introduction, the global governance of education from the start of the century was characterised by the coexistence of multiple, and sometimes, overlapping negotiation processes that were not always harmonious or conflict-free. There were significant power asymmetries and competing expectations in relation to both the decision-making architecture, as well as significant disagreements in relation to the content of these goals and the priorities they placed.

In more detail, since 2000, the global education agenda had been informed by two separate sets of goals; these were, on the one hand, the Education for All (EFA) goals, established in Dakar (WEF, 2000) and, on the other, the MDGs³. Importantly, both sets of goals were associated with a specific decision-making architecture and with different communities of practice. Therefore, both agendas emerged in parallel (interestingly, the loci of power were two cities: New York for the EFA and Paris for the MDGs) and from the interaction of different groups of actors, who relied on particular consensus-making scripts; this is significant in relation to the production of narratives, since the EFA negotiations were initially in a power struggle with the MDG education-related goals, only for UNESCO to ‘surrender’ in the face of a losing battle. While the EFA agenda (and especially, the so-called Dakar goals⁴) was very much the product of a consensus, carefully crafted by the global education community (i.e., specialised circles of experts and transnational bureaucrats with an education background), and reflecting the multiple priorities of education agencies while allowing civil society to make a meaningful contribution, this was not obviously the case with regard to the MDGs, which viewed education in much more narrow terms (one goal focusing on universal primary education).

Since the negotiation of the SDGs was approached by different agents as an opportunity to put an end to the duality of education agendas, but also as a danger that disagreement in the education policymaking world might mean an exclusion of education from the SDG agenda, the realignment of the EFA agenda with the MDG education ‘camp’ required crafting a new set of education targets. This meant, in practice, the need to combine the decision-making procedures specific to the EFA architecture with the myriad of negotiation processes set in motion within UN circles as a continuation of the MDGs; thus, the major disagreement was perhaps centred more around the decision-making processes between the two agendas and less about the goals themselves. Nonetheless, it was through a new agreement on the goals that a breakthrough was to be found: this was the Muscat Agreement, signed in May 2014—the document eventually led to its approval at the World Education Forum 2015, with the expectation that it would become an integral part of the global development agenda to be adopted at the UN Summit in New York City in September 2015—that is, the SDGs.

Indeed, the Muscat agreement, signed by a large number of education ‘ministers, leading officials of multilateral and bilateral organisations, and senior representatives of civil society and private sector organisations’ (p. 1), was the result of the Global Education for All (EFA) meeting in Oman under the auspices of UNESCO’s General Conference on ‘Education beyond 2015’. It is obvious, even from the very first sentences of this document, that the Agreement and thus the reason for this large gathering of education actors from around the world is not a new development; rather, it is another meeting in the long line of efforts to achieve ‘Education for All’. In fact, the document not only does not shy away from its past, but seems to be bolstered by the fact that this appears by now an established and well-trodden path, and one that the EFA ‘movement’ had established:

We acknowledge that the worldwide movement for Education for All, initiated in Jomtien in 1990 and reaffirmed in Dakar in 2000, has been the most important commitment in education in recent decades and has helped to drive significant progress in education.

Here, we see that the narrative-building begins through the construction of a shared agenda and a ‘movement’ that should be not specific to some actors versus others, but that is ‘worldwide’ and that is marked through important, similar to this one events, in other places and times: in Jomtien in 1990 and Dakar in 2000. As a result, the text here gathers the pace and progress of past events that have prepared it but also asserts EFA as a significant locus of decision-making in the field. In addition, it also hails the Muscat meeting as a milestone in the line of such agreements and gatherings.

However, the tone quickly shifts and offers an olive branch—neither of the two separate goal-setting ‘movements’ has achieved their aims:

Yet we recognise that the Education for All (EFA) agenda and the education-related Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) are unlikely to be achieved by 2015…More than 57 million children and 69 million adolescents still do not have access to effective basic education. In 2011, an estimated 774 million adults, of whom almost two-thirds were women, were illiterate….At least 250 million children are not able to read, write or count…Gender inequality is of particular concern, as only 60% of countries had achieved gender parity at the primary level and 38% at the secondary level by 2011. (p. 1, GEM, 2014)

The use of evidence in narrative-making is a powerful rhetorical tool in creating the necessary epistemic and measurement contexts for launching new decisions and commitments. Startling is also the change of mood here: from the positive and encouraging collective work that has led to this moment (i.e., the Muscat meeting in 2014), numerical evidence is used to show that these efforts still leave a lot to be desired. Therefore, the narration of numbers sets the stage and the mood as one of continuous crisis and emergency: there is urgent need for new action to be taken. Above all, the script is using a certain logic of appropriateness (what is moral and ethical to do) in order to suggest that such evident crisis needs a united policy front, not one riddled with conflict and separation. Such a discourse of consensus-building is core in the production of the narrative in the Muscat Agreement: this is a story about earlier disunity and failure versus a present and future of unity and achievement.

However, the part failure of past efforts does not deter the authors of the text to pace the rate of change; it is precisely the urgency of the situation that further strengthens the commitment to not only achieve the targets previously set but also set new, even more aspirational ones:

Therefore, we recognise that there is a strong need for a new and forward-looking education agenda that completes unfinished business while going beyond the current goals in terms of depth and scope, as well as to provide people with the understanding, competencies and values they require to address the many challenges that our societies and economies are facing. (p. 2, GEM, 2014)

The Muscat Agreement constructs a narrative that builds on three pillars: first, it clearly spells out that the EFA has been a force of change with a history of over 25 years, the gathering and commitment of key education actors from local, national and international levels; second, the achievement of—at very least—a technical and robust measurement agenda that can offer a fairly concise picture of the levels of educational inequality around the globe and third, the need to unify efforts by both education communities (EFA and the MDGs) in order to have education established as an SDG target in its own right.

Additionally, as the section on ‘Vision, principles and scope of the post-2015 education agenda’ shows, it works on defining and reaffirming the place of education in—what is slowly emerging as—a global agenda that places sustainable development at its core: it achieves that through outlining the main principles of the group, as well as specifying what the targets for achieving these principles should look like. Interestingly, this is the set of principles that the Muscat participants agreed upon; in summary,

• 1. ‘We reaffirm that education is a fundamental human right…’;

• 2. ‘The post-2015 education agenda should be clearly defined, aspirational, transformative, balanced and holistic, and an integral part of the broader international development framework…Education must be a stand-alone goal in a broader post-2015 development agenda and should be framed by a comprehensive overarching goal, with measurable global targets and related indicators…’;

• 3. ‘We affirm that the post-2015 education agenda should be rights-based and reflect a perspective based on equity and inclusion, with particular attention to gender equality and to overcoming all forms of discrimination in and through education…’

• 4. We stress that the full realisation of the post-2015 education agenda will require a strong commitment by both governments and donors to allocate adequate, equitable and efficient financing to education…accompanied by strengthened participatory governance, civil society participation and accountability mechanisms… as well as improved planning, monitoring and reporting mechanisms and processes’ (p. 2, GEM 2014, our emphasis).

We see that there are three primary concerns outlined above; these relate to first, reaffirming the place of education as a human right, therefore connecting closely not only this agreement but also the emergence of the SDG education agenda as a whole with the culture, tradition and institutional identity of UNESCO. This is an important move, as by 2014, multiple other actors, such as the OECD and the World Bank, had also become key education policy-trendsetters globally, and their perspectives on education did not always coincide with those of UNESCO and the EFA movement. As a result, the Muscat agreement indirectly specifies who the key organisation behind the new post-2015 agenda should be.

Second, the Agreement sets a clear demand for the way forward: education must be a stand-alone goal and not be subsumed by other goals in the SDG agenda. The Muscat Agreement is a key narrative script in—momentarily at least—unifying a vastly conflicted field, that had seen two parallel streams of work emerging globally and often in opposition to each other. Narrative-building starts from three commonplaces for education communities: first, the line of similar events and global meetings; second, the challenges of disagreement and of creating some form of consensus in a really complex and conflicting field and third, the growing crisis of education inequalities. There is a clear message in this narrative that highlights the need to move away from fragmentation towards bringing the two different ‘movements’ together, in an effort to ensure a singular place of education in the SDG agenda, and not its subsumption within other policy areas and goals.

Where is that the education community should now move to? Goal-setting becomes key narrative practice and takes centre stage in the story, since the signatories appear to universally agree that this should be a technical exercise, focused on pre-defined and well-specified measurement and monitoring agenda, with clear accountability mechanisms and generous funding from donors and governments. The mixing of accountability and financing indirectly connects the two as interdependent. Interestingly, the next section in the agreement moves on to do something quite extraordinary; it sets a number of targets without prespecifying them:

‘We support “Ensure equitable and inclusive quality education and lifelong learning for all by 2030” as the overarching goal of the post-2015 education agenda.

We further support the translation of this goal into the following global targets, for which minimum global benchmarks and relevant indicators will be identified/ developed:

Target 1: By 2030, at least x% of girls and boys are ready for primary school through participation in quality early childhood care and education…’. (p. 3, GEM 2014)

The list of targets continues with seven targets in total, all of which begin with the time framing of ‘by 2030’. They all set specific targets without, however, specifying numerically what the goal should be: in other words, this is a list of ‘targets’, outlined using language, decontextualised by aspiring them to be applicable globally, yet with no specific numerical inscriptions assigned to them. This practice highlights the ‘target-setting’ in itself is a narrative-building practice as it creates ‘narrative scaffolding’ for the policy stories to be told—stories of improvement and mobilisation but also stories of urgency (‘by 2030’). What is unique in this case is the fact that this scaffolding is so pervasive that it allows creating numerical narrative, even without specific numbers—just notional percentages of an imagined world ‘by 2030’. This is the use of numerical narratives, despite the absence of real numbers quantifying the goals.

Finally, the Agreement ends by explicitly outlining its support to UNESCO to act as the lead organisation for the facilitation of this agenda, in addition to reaffirming the significance of ensuring that the SDG framework has ‘a strong education component’ (p. 3, GEMA 2014). Although the ambiguity of such non-numbers is startling, what is of interest is the ways numbers still operate as the negotiation instrument for agreeing on a common agenda. Thus, we see the ways that the Muscat Agreement, through its carefully crafted, edited, checked and double-checked script becomes the governing locus where organisational, epistemic and political struggles manage to settle. Its significance is evident, by agreements that succeeded it; first of which was the Incheon Declaration.

4.2 The 2015 Incheon Declaration

The Education 2030 Incheon Declaration was published in the World Education Forum, in Incheon, the Republic of Korea, from 19 to 22 May 2015. According to the document, ‘over 1,600 participants from 160 countries’ took part; the Forum was organised by UNESCO, ‘together with UNICEF, the World Bank UNFPA, UNDP, UN Women and UNHCR’ (p. 5, UNESCO, 2016).

The narrative-building in the Incheon Declaration begins from the commonplace of the education emergency that nations are faced with. Nonetheless, it also offers, for the first time, the marrying of the two previous initiatives, in constructing one education goal in the SDG agenda. This is what came to be known as the SDG4—Education 2030 (hence the double-barrelled name):

‘The world has made some remarkable progress in education since 2000, when the six Education for All (EFA) goals and the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) were established. Those goals were not, however, reached by the 2015 deadline and continued action is needed to complete the unfinished agenda. With Goal 4 of Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development—‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’ (hereafter referred to as SDG4- Education 2030)—and its associate targets, the world has set a more ambitious universal education agenda for the period from 2015-2030. Every effort must be made to guarantee that this time the goal and targets are achieved’. (p. 22, UNESCO, 2016, emphasis in the original)

The document moves on to explain the ‘broad consultative process’, ‘facilitated by UNESCO’, which took place to arrive to the SDG4-Education 2030 agenda and targets and further expands on the membership of the decision-making body to now also include a range of actors, such as the OECD; the Global Partnership for Education (GPE); civil society; the teaching profession and the private sector. Therefore, the Incheon Declaration further stabilises the narrative of a universal and aspirational motto of ‘education for all’ by announcing a single strategy and by adding new, crucial actors the mix of stakeholders agreeing to work together to achieve them; notably, the OECD and the private sector.

Similar to the Muscat agreement, the Declaration is structured around different sections; namely, these discuss ‘vision, rationale and principles’; ‘the global education goal and its associated seven targets and three means of implementation’; ‘governance, monitoring, follow-up and review mechanisms’ and finally, ‘financing and partnerships’ (p. 24, UNESCO, 2016). The focus in this analysis will be centred primarily around the governance and monitoring agenda, as the most relevant in relation to (re-) constructing the narrative of the SDG4.

Although the Declaration begins by referring to the ‘old’ instruments of establishing principles and values in universal education (‘treaties, conventions, agreements and protocols, as well as international instruments, such as recommendations and declarations’, p. 31 ibid), it swiftly shifts ground to set a new normal for building global education initiatives. We see a substantial narrative change here towards a transformation to a whole new governing logic, where monitoring, data and accountability are not only important but in fact an indispensable tool for the strategy:

‘In implementing the new agenda, the focus should be on efficiency, effectiveness and equity of education systems…Furthermore, to ensure quality education and conditions for effective education outcomes, governments should strengthen education systems by instituting and improving appropriate, effective and inclusive governance and accountability mechanisms; quality assurance; education management information systems; transparent and effective financing procedures and mechanisms; and institutional arrangements, as well as ensure that robust, time and accessible data are available’. (p. 32, UNESCO, 2016)

This—importantly—is not only a narrative of the policy contents but rather it offers a new meaning around the governance processes themselves. According to this new narrative, targets should not be open-ended and aspirational declarations any longer; instead, they have to be ‘specific and measurable’ and ‘country-led’ (p. 35)—as such, it proposes both the new heroes of the story (the country government as the key players) but also requires a specific moral to the SDG story, one formulated through precise targets. The Incheon Declaration changes the narrative from previous story-making (e.g., the Muscat Agreement) and suggests that just goal-setting in broad terms will not be enough: instead, there is a need to establish specific targets which will have to be monitored through regular cycles of reporting and accountability: ‘this requires establishing intermediate benchmarks (e.g., for 2020 and 2025) through an inclusive process, with full transparency and accountability, engaging all partners so there is country ownership and common understanding’. More explicitly, ‘intermediate benchmarks can be set as quantitative goalposts for review of global process vis-à-vis the longer term goals’. Finally, ‘intermediate benchmarks are indispensable for addressing the accountability deficit associated with longer-term targets’ (p. 35, ibid).

The Incheon Declaration continues the incremental changes pushed by the Muscat Agreement, by offering a measurement-led programme of education governance: the monitoring agenda is not only essential, measurable and country-driven, it also has to be based on a governing architecture with reporting mechanisms at regular intervals through the establishment of intermediate benchmarks. As is commonplace when declaring such substantial shifts in narrative-building, this passage quickly pivots to dramatic language of continued crisis and failure to deliver equitable education for all:

Despite significant progress since 2000, an estimated 59 million children of primary school age and 65 million adolescents of lower secondary school age…were still out of school in 2013…At least 250 million primary-school-aged children, more than 50% of whom have spent at least four years in school, cannot read, write or count well enough to meet minimum learning standards’. (p. 36, UNESCO, 2016)

The critical turning point that the education emergency has taken requires the drawing up of four different sets of indicators to outline policy priorities and organise the measurement goals: these are specified as global (a small set of globally comparable indicators for all SDGs); thematic (a broader set of globally comparable indicators proposed by the education community); regional and national. Although this differentiation of indicators appeared here as based on levels of government only, it is by now well-documented that eventually it became a qualitative distinction; in other words, much more emphasis has been given to the global indicators (vs. all the other sets) precisely because of the comparability element and the fact that they are part of the SDG framework.

Finally, in terms of ‘implementation modalities’ (p. 57), national governments are seen as having the ‘primary responsibility’ or ‘regulating standards, improving quality and reducing disparity’ (p. 57), following a ‘whole of government’ approach to education: ‘Country-led action will drive change’ (p. 60). Interestingly, the document highlights the need for ‘regional coordination’, too, by suggesting to focus on ‘such aspects as data collection and monitoring, including peer reviews among countries; mutual learning and exchange of good practices; policy-making; dialogue and partnerships with all relevant partners; formal meetings and high-level events; advocacy and resource mobilisation; capacity-building; and implementation of joint progress’ (p. 61). Thus, the document not only establishes a framework for delivering a measurement agenda; it also creates the expectation that national governments deliver on this agenda and that they do so through peer pressure mechanisms and comparisons with their neighbouring countries and globally.

Therefore, discursively at least, another interesting feature of the new global education narrative in the Incheon Declaration is the repeated emphasis on the need for capacity building in relation to statistical expertise, as well as the ‘need for sustained, innovative and well-targeted financing and efficient implementation arrangements’. In fact, the signatories of the Declaration state that the SDG4 targets and policy priorities are explicitly promoted as needing to become part of existing national education policies, plans and processes. It is strongly advised that efforts to realise SDG4 commitments should not result in parallel or separate plans and processes:

SDG4 policy commitments do not exist outside of existing national policies, planning, management and monitoring processes and mechanisms. Rather, existing country-led systems, processes and mechanisms should be supported or strengthened to ensure better alignment/adaptation with global commitments’. (UNESCO, 2016; 9)

To conclude, it is evident that the SDG4 is not exclusively a performance monitoring agenda. It uses a strong narrative built around it, not only in relation to the need for measurement towards achieving the priorities set (described almost exclusively in the language of different sets of indicators), but also in relation to the new initiative being seen as necessary, ethical, participatory and local. Yet, as we will see in the next section, winning ‘hearts and minds’ requires more than simply setting up a measurement framework and reporting and accountability mechanisms; it needs a persuasive story.

5 Visualisation as Storytelling in Education

Numerical and discursive narratives are more often than not accompanied by visual narratives. Data storytelling is particularly interesting for the analysis of knowledge production for governing as, instead of concealing the in-built biases and assumptions that all objectivity-making requires, it does precisely the opposite. That is, it works with people’s engrained world views as well as learnt visual codes and attempts to mobilise them by pressing towards the making of new political problems and political values.In this section, we will illustrate this process through which the data is imbued with values and emotions in the Left Behind⁵—a data visualisation focusing on girls’ education in Africa. It was produced for the UNESCO Institute for Statistics by Function, a data visualisation studio based in Montreal. Its sources primarily draw upon administrative data from UIS. The visual focuses on the gender inequality problem, and in particular the non-participation of African girls in education. As the analysis below will show, although the basis of the Left Behind visual is the ranked comparison of African countries and world regions, data and the graphs are simply the setting of the story; the characters, the plot and the moral message are the ones at centre stage (Chart 3).

Chart 3

Front webpage of Left Behind visualisation

The data visualisation follows very closely the main features of a story; in fact, by using an introduction, as well as specific separate sections, the visual resembles closely the familiar feel and structure of a book. Its title page is very minimal; it offers a title and a subtitle with the background image of a girl reading, while sitting on the ground and leaning back on a wooden structure. More so than the actual image, the colour palette used for the image immediately travels the audience to the dry, hot, dusty African plains—resembling the common depictions of the continent in art and culture.

Against a slightly hazy background (a feature that continues in the whole visualisation), the title fonts are simple, medium-sized and white. There is a certain softness and stillness in the image, as we enter the world of the little girl reading. Despite the crisis in gender equity in education in Africa, the image travels us without any judgements or flashy messages. The title page offers the destination and the focus, while simultaneously creating the sensation of a slow, earthy, hot land where kids still play outside barefoot. The introductory section is structured in a very similar manner: questions (‘What would your life be like if you only had 5 years of schooling?’), answers (‘For some African girls, this is the most education they can expect, and they are the lucky ones’), and statements of crisis and hope (‘Across the region, millions of girls are out of school and many will never set foot in a classroom’, ‘The world has renewed its promise to the millions of girls who have been left behind’). All the text is presented sentence by sentence as one scrolls through the visualisation, with the background images of girls in classrooms, in the same light creamy, dusky colour hues.

The rest of the visualisation is structured in the format of book chapters, always introduced with a title page (01. The Last Mile, 02. Barriers, 03. Persistence of Illiteracy among Women, 04. Poor school conditions, 05. More Teachers needed, especially women). Each ‘chapter’ presents relevant data in maps or graph formats. The different pages and graphs are all interactive—they do comparisons of African countries or world regions over time or in ratios. The interactive graphs and maps can be manipulated by viewers through simple movements of the mouse over them. There is nothing extraordinary about these graphs; they follow the common characteristics of contemporary visualisations, following simple lines, laconic explanatory text and modern design.

What is, however, much more interesting when one has a closer look is that all the data charts, maps and graphs are very carefully chosen and put together: some compare selected African countries (depending on the question, these countries are different every time but they are usually low in number). As a result, similar to the image, the data discussed is also fairly minimal, perhaps just a snapshot. Some graphs compare Sub-Saharan Africa with other continents; and others just focus on simple ratios, between literate and illiterate women. While all data can be accessed by clicking on the black rectangular box at the bottom right of the page, what is striking in every one of these graphs is the careful selection of comparative country or regional data. Although there is clear ranking of countries depending on how well or badly they perform in relation to gender equity, the ranking as a visual, quick and blunt manifestation of best and worst performances is completely abandoned here. There are better and worse country cases (this is the function of any graph and therefore of these graphs, too), but the comparison here only serves as an illustration of the wider political problem of gender inequity—this is further enhanced by the persistent alternating of country comparisons with world comparisons (Chart 4).

Chart 4

Snapshots of Left Behind visualisation (01)

Through the mix of data visualisations and other visual elements (pictures, colour palette, the interactivity of the dashboard), Left Behind tells a story that balances the need for urgency and intervention and optimistic outlook for the future in which these interventions were realised. Although the main character remains the same (i.e., African girls, women or teachers—as reflected in both the numerical data and pictures), the plot is very carefully crafted in order to move from setting the context outlining the trajectory of change where some challenges have been overcome whilst others took the central stage (0.1 The Last Mile: ‘there are good news…but the gender gap persists’), to a discussion of all persisting issues (in ‘chapters’ 2,3,4) to the relatively uplifting final section on the necessity to have a larger women teacher workforce. Finally, despite what otherwise would have been read as a major inequity crisis, the data visualisation ends the story with nothing less than a ‘happy ending’: ‘The good news is that the international community has not forgotten these girls’. The intention here is for the visual not to paralyse, but fill its viewers with optimism and positive resolve to tackle the problem; and although the text suggests that the SDGs have pledged to decrease inequality, it asks the viewer to also ‘have their say’ (Chart 5).

Chart 5

Snapshots of Left Behind visualisation (02)

This is perhaps the first step in constructing actionable knowledge: enlist one’s audience not only to read and understand, but to share their experience of the African girls’ education story and mobilise others. Interestingly, the visual does not use any bullet-point language, like most traditional print reports do. While it offers a plethora of interactive information, allowing comparison of performances and progress over time, and although it digests data through some short statements in every page of the analysis, it finishes off with a simple question (Fig. 10): ‘What do you think it will take to leave no girl behind?’

This question is at the crux of this chapter’s argument: rather than finish off with a definitive memorable statement, or a killer graph, apt for the severity of the issue, Left Behind ends with an invitation to the viewer to think for themselves; that is, to weigh the evidence offered and contextualise the issue within their own story-worlds and experiences. Needless to say, this does not mean that careful selection of data and arguments has not taken place here, and that all interpretations and questions are open: quite the contrary. It is precisely because of the meticulous orchestration of text, image and data, as well as the precise crafting of the plot, that this kind of engagement can be invited. In reality, the question is primarily a rhetorical one: these are the multiple worlds that data visualisations fabricate, worlds into which specific and precise policy facts do not matter as much as the interpretive possibilities data (and especially an effective visual data story) can open up (Chart 6).

Chart 6

Left Behind last page

6 Discussion

This chapter has examined the production of narratives in the field of the global governance of education, especially through the analysis of two major collective declarations as well as the examination of data visualisation as another popular and effective story-making device. We have seen how narratives are used as the material building blocks of the SDG epistemic infrastructure: they work in order to construct sense and stability in situations of fragmentation or increasing complexity. Thus, we see them as vital components of specifying ‘who should do what, and how, when and why they should do it in order to address policy dilemmas’ (Kaplan, 1986; 770).

It is the potential of narratives to create coherence and consistency of message and structure that makes them particularly necessary as the material underpinnings of the epistemic infrastructure of global governance. As Ricoeur suggests ‘the plot or narrative…groups together and integrates into one whole and complete story multiple and scattered events, thereby schematising the intelligible signification attached to the narrative taken as a whole’ (Ricoeur, 1984: 10). The intelligibility of events, actors and decisions is of particular significance in global public policy, since the multiplicity of fora, projects and actors renders the field often unknown even to those who are active participants in it. Thus, they do not only create coherence but create logic and, as we saw from the examples above, through the use of ‘shocking’ numbers of failure they offer compelling and passionate accounts of complex phenomena.

This chapter discussed the ways that stories and narratives in global public policy also depend on creating a crisis discourse; thus, logos (data), pathos (emotion) and ethos (values) are closely intertwined to create calls for unity and action. Data and numbers, therefore, become the engines of story-making: they are not only the valuable resource that allows actors to understand—even feel—the emergency, but through the dominant instrument of goal-setting, metrics are also offered as the vital component of any possible future solution. Here, as suggested earlier, we follow closely Boswell et al.’s conceptual contribution to the study of narratives, which has stressed the cognitive dimension of knowledge claims made. Thus, we see quantified targets as taking centre stage in delineating the nature and scale of the problem (Schneider and Ingram 1993), in constructing causality by constructing arguments that appear comprehensible and convincing and importantly, in appearing themselves as the only viable option for a way forward (Fischer & Forester, 1993); the example of the Muscat Agreement that outlines what the targets and hence policy priorities should be, without specifying numerical figures, is a telling example of this.

Perhaps more importantly, however, we have seen how narratives use goal-setting and numerical targets in order to create bridges and find compromise between otherwise competing and opposing interests and world views. Narratives are inherently formats imposing coherence on complex and messy political realities—and they do so predominantly by selecting ideas and events that could be organised by the plot whilst excluding others. The field of education, and especially the case of the SDG4, is very rich in such a history of education communities being at war with one another, with substantial and enduring differences in relation to both the architecture of governance of the global education policy space and the policy content itself. The scripting of the Muscat agreement is a case in point here: it allowed, after a very long time, the crafting of a narrative that created enough space and shared targets for both communities to align themselves with, especially under the threat of the exclusion of education from the SDGs as a stand-alone goal. In such a context, goal-setting appears not only as significant instrument for the scripting of the story, but almost as the necessary pre-condition that brings actors together; for if there is one common frame, that is goal-setting as the one globally accepted norm of organising policy work.

On the other hand, the discussion of the Left behind visualisation is another eloquent demonstration of the power of numbers to tell a story effectively, using established visual cues and story framings, whilst allowing enough flexibility for the reader to create their own understandings and meanings from the data provided. Thus, it represents the policy narrative’s ‘multi-interpretability’ that provides its appeal to various actors (Hajer, 1995) and enhances the story’s persuasiveness and reach. Ultimately, the chapter’s main aim was to focus on the materialities and intertwinements of numerical data, discursive text and visual images in order to manifest their vital work in upholding, facilitating and even ‘emotionalizing’ the epistemic infrastructure. For the infrastructure is not merely a mechanical construction, functioning according to the orders of some distant centre of operations: on the contrary, it is a living macrocosm in need of stories to breathe.