Keywords

1 Introduction

The starting point of this book was an observation that despite the burgeoning number of publications on the global phenomenon of ‘governing by numbers’, our understanding of the relationship between the politics of measurement and how transnational governance comes into being is less well examined. Due to the fluidity and complexity of intense cross-boundary networks and ‘soft’ regulation regimesFootnote 1 that dominate the transnational space, transnational governance is a particularly productive space to interrogate the role of quantification as an infrastructure that facilitates governance (Djelic & Sahlin-Andersson, 2006). This chapter explores the role of different organisations and individual actors within them in creating the connections and outlining the directions of the new sustainability agenda.

By exploring the role of networks, meetings and interdependencies, we focus on the key process through which numbers, data and indicators are transformed into an epistemic infrastructure. The process of network-making that is at the heart of this chapter is as inherently a process of infrastructuring of the SDGs and creating common governing spaces around numbers. Thus, a central focus of this chapter is the examination of the politics of quantification through the prism of the political work of the actors (Lagroye, 1997) involved in the collection and validation of country data as part of global performance monitoring (Grek, 2020b). By ‘political work’ we mean actors’ practices undertaken in order to develop and manage the interdependencies between internal (upstream) and external (downstream) relationships, as well as personal ideas, values and interests;

political work takes place through and across a range of configurations of actors who compete to construct alliances—political enterprises—that are capable of winning the negotiations they are involved in. (Jullien & Smith, 2008, p. 16; italics in original)

This chapter returns to the construction of the fourth of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 4) within the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda (UNESCO, 2016). Having examined the discursive construction of the governing and measurement infrastructure of the SDG4 in “Scripting the SDGs: The Role of Narratives in Governing by Goals” chapter, this chapter will focus on the political work of actors involved in effecting and monitoring progress towards achieving SDG 4 by forming networks and collaborations around measurement. This work is complex and often contradictory, as it requires that they come together and share knowledge and working practices, whilst at the same time they need to preserve their respective organisation’s unique ‘brand’, their expertise and services, as well as managing their own personal values and career aspirations. These centrifugal forces of collaboration and competition allow for an in-depth analysis of the workings of ‘soft’ regulation through quantification. Thus, examining these actors’ work represents a unique opportunity to open a ‘black box’ in the field of global monitoring, rather than stacking yet another one (Bhuta, 2012).

2 Networks and Interdependencies in the Epistemic Infrastructures of the SDGs

The SDGs entail not only the extensive architecture of quantified measures but also—the system of connections and linkages that bring together the goals, targets, indicators and data into a complex web of relations, processes and practices (Tichenor et al., 2022). These linkages and interdependencies encapsulate a growing number of actors—from the UN agencies, member states to philanthropic and civil society organisations and academia. These complex relationships happen through and around numbers—which can both stabilise the connections and mobilise new constituencies and new interdependencies.

This chapter explores the SDGs as a particular form of network governance (Provan & Kenis, 2008) as they organise diverse social, political and economic priorities around the process and practices of quantification. On the one hand, networks have been characterised as a key element of governance itself, since it is the collaborative arrangements between autonomous organisations, as well as the brokering between them, that make governance happen. Seen in this way, network coordination amongst diverse actors can enhance learning, use resources efficiently and deal with complex problems that require a multitude of perspectives and action (O’Toole, 1997). On the other hand, a focus on producing quantified knowledge as a key organising principle of these communities resembles what Peter Haas (1992) famously termed epistemic communities. This framework assumed that knowledge is being produced and shared in (international) policy through networks of experts. These experts have ‘authoritative claims’ (Haas, 1992, p. 3) to knowledge—entailing not only academic knowledge but also persuasive power over the interpretation of that knowledge. As argued by Haas (1992), the members of epistemic communities do not need to have the same disciplinary background, but they do have to share common values and beliefs, as well as the general understanding of causes and effects in specific areas and shared practices of validating knowledge. Unlike Haas’ focus, the exploration of networks within the SDG governance points to broader diversity of participating actors, going beyond just elite experts and instead including different groups of practitioners, both from the Global South and North.

Empirically, this chapter traces the development of the production of the SDG4 in order to show the ways that the incremental build-up of the discourse, technical expertise and necessary—though always fragile—alliances facilitated a paradigmatic policy shift in the field of education: this is the move from the measurement of schooling (Barro & Lee, 1996) to the measurement of learning; that is, an emphasis on prioritising a focus on learning outcomes, skills and competencies, measured through what children ‘can do’ with the knowledge they acquire at school. In other words, instead of the traditional education statistics that measured inputs such as education expenditure, teacher salaries and length of the school year, the pendulum shifted to a greater interest in decontextualised, applied knowledge measured in real-life contexts. This chapter looks at the example of the SDG4 in order to illustrate the broader dynamics of the epistemic infrastructure. Although the work around the construction of the SDG4 (both prior to and after 2015) is not the only process that facilitated this shift (indeed its origins lie in New Public Management and the economisation of education discourse in the 1980s and early 1990s—see Gunter et al. (2016) and Ozga et al. (2009)), the global nature of the SDG4 process and the active involvement of most key education actors in its production led to a concerted effort to devise global learning metrics (Crouch & Montoya, 2019). Thus, the SDG4 became a prime metrological site of the production of this radical reconceptualisation of education measurement and policy with implications globally (and not just across a handful of countries of the Global North).

3 From Schooling to Learning: The Emergence of an Epistemic Infrastructure

The discursive and metrological shift that moved the measurement agenda from a focus on schooling to learning began as early as 2000s. On the one hand, the OECD PISA, although measuring the skills and competencies of 15-year-olds in the global North (at least in the first rounds of the learning assessment and before its expansion in 2012 and 2015), received unprecedented media and policy attention worldwide; this was due to PISA’s ranking of countries according to their education performance. PISA and subsequently the OECD prided itself in decontextualising education by focusing global, comparative testing not on the knowledge that students acquire at school (thus moving away from traditional ways of approaching schooling and curricula) but on what students can do with this knowledge. The OECD made direct links between countries’ future competitiveness to how well schools prepare students to enter the labour market. PISA results were announced at the end of each testing cycle (every three years) and caused ‘shock and awe’ to many European countries in particular (and increasingly globally) including the ‘education catastrophe’ that hit Germany, or the ‘education miracle’ that turned Finland into an education tourist hotspot for education ministers and experts from around the world (Grek, 2009, 2013).

Nonetheless, perhaps more so than the OECD, it was the work of the World Bank that shifted the education debate, given the Bank’s influence in the Global South (Prada-Uribe, 2012). The World Bank opposed the MDG emphasis on access to education, suggesting that lack of education had never been only a matter of whether children are in school or not; instead, it was suggested that the focus should be on what children achieve at schools when they are there. The work was undertaken by senior economists at the World Bank and the links to improved national economic growth were explicit from the start: in two key research reports (Glewwe, 2002; Hanushek & Kimko, 2000), it was suggested that individual mobility and better economic outcomes were achieved in countries that focused on knowledge and skills acquired in primary schools, rather than those systems that merely aimed to increase access. In 2006, another World Bank report became a milestone moment for education measurement, as it shifted the debate not only in education policy circles but also in development ones. The report, provocatively entitled ‘From Schooling to Learning’ (IEG-WB, 2006), was written by the Independent Evaluation Group and created a polemical discourse against the MDGs’ focus on access and completion: it suggested that the current emphasis was misplaced and that much more attention should be given to the improvement of skills and competencies, as it is the latter that leads to economic prosperity and better outcomes.

As a consequence, the Center for Global Development appointed three World Bank economists to further explore the issue; their report, A Millennium Learning Goal: Measuring Real Progress in Education (Filmer et al., 2006), unequivocally suggested that there was no evidence that showed that completion of primary school guaranteed the achievement of minimal levels of literacy and numeracy and that a re-think was long overdue. The materiality of data, reports and meetings intersected with the work of specific expert organisations and actors and led to a substantial policy shift, which was first taken up by specific governments.

Indeed, the arguments developed by the OECD and the World Bank had far more purchase in the development community groups, rather than in education (at least at the start). Both DFID (the UK’s former Department for International Development) and USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) produced new strategies in the period 2010–2015 that identified the measurement of learning outcomes as an institutional priority and consequently channelled their education investments accordingly. Although there were a number of voices from academia that suggested that a singular focus on learning outcomes would take the attention away from other important pedagogical aspects (Barrett, 2011; Tikly, 2015), their commentary remained ‘academic’; they had little policy influence and impact. Yet, there were still quite a few voices in education, especially those from UNESCO and the civil society, that were worried about the new trend and the misplacement, as they saw it, of education and schooling measures with those of outputs. Once again, the two functions of education, the humanistic and the economic one, were pitted against one another. The result was the slow emergence of ‘a divide between those emphasizing quality and those primarily concerned with learning outcomes…Even if the differences between the two approaches were originally a matter of nuance or emphasis, they ended up forming two distinct communities of understanding, informed by different sets of ideas’ (Fontdevila, 2021, p. 177)

As the decade progressed and the end of the MDG time frame was drawing to a close, we can observe a much more concerted effort not only to change the discourse (that had already been achieved) but also to start building an infrastructure for the establishment of a new measurement agenda, one in which learning, skills and competencies would be centre-stage and would replace the previous failing targets. The key protagonist in this new era was not the World Bank (though it was always supporting in the background) but a new initiative, the Global Compact for Learning (GCL), which was launched in 2011 by the Brookings Institute Center for Universal Education. GCL quickly became an advocacy tool; through its reports, it created a sense of urgency, putting forward the idea that there was a learning crisis that was ‘hitting the poorest, most marginalized and the youth particularly hard’ (CUE, 2011). Just a year later, UNESCO in conjunction with the Global Education Monitoring Report (GEMR, 2012) published an estimate of the number of children not achieving basic literacy skills as reaching 250 million. The shocking figure became further ammunition not only for those that were pushing for the learning turn, but also for those who were suggesting the benefits of international learning assessments; without them, there would have been no evidence of this crisis. Thus, the crisis discourse had created a sense of urgency and would quickly turn into the need for action. Not only was it obvious that the MDG targets, set in 2000, were not going to be met, but also it had become evident—to some, at least—that these targets were ill-defined and misplaced and thus were failing millions of children around the world.

Crucially, GCL prepared the ground for the launch of another key initiative: the Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF) was established in 2013 with the aim to ‘catalyze a shift in the global conversation on education from a focus on access to access plus learning’ (UIS/CUE, 2013; emphasis mine). This was a subtle, yet fundamental change and an open invitation to the two measurement camps to come together in search of the post-2015 agenda. Brookings invited the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS) to head the task force, an important gesture towards an actor that appeared more trustworthy (to teacher organisations and civil society, at least) than the World Bank. More crucially, this was not an elite exercise; rather, LMTF was a very diverse organisation that included a wide range of actors not only from the International Organisations’ expert world, but also from regional organisations, donors, governments, statistical agencies and civil society. The pluralistic nature of the membership, coupled with its UIS leadership and the timing (the preparations for the post-2015 agenda had already begun), made the LMTF the perfect opportunity to build the measurement infrastructure not only up but wide. This was the moment when the build-up of the new measurement agenda was to stretch across contexts and organisations to expand spatially, too. Essentially, the establishment of the LMTF became the foundation for building—what would later be called—the SDG4.

LMTF brought together a vast array of actors and organisations in its efforts to offer legitimacy to the task of shifting the debate and subsequently the post-2015 goals for education. As the previous section showed, it approached the contentious topic of the prioritisation of metrics and goals diplomatically, suggesting that they were interested in exploring ‘access plus learning’ metrics. Thus, an olive branch was extended to academics, the civil society and professional organisations that perceived the learning focus as reductionist and as reflecting merely the economistic lens of the Bank’s ideological positioning. Additionally, UIS’ leadership (e.g., and not the World Bank’s) gave the project not only credibility but also a ticket to move away from merely debating over priorities (the 250 million failing children was an alarm that kept on ringing) towards trying to find practical measurement solutions for their aims—in light of PISA and other regional, cross-national tests, the attention turned to the production of learning assessments, which, as it happened, have become the key data production machines for the SDG4 agenda (Fontdevila, 2021).

Despite the seemingly celebratory and ambitious language, the work of the LMTF was challenging, given that consensus had to be found not only on the aims themselves but also in relation to how these aims would translate into measurable indicators, as well as which spaces of deliberation would constitute the legitimate decision-making venues for making these choices. This is due to the fact that the efforts to devise the SDG4 indicator framework did not start by the UN Statistical Commission, but dated back to the establishment of an inter-agency, ad-hoc platform known as the Technical Advisory Group (TAG). Originally, the TAG was established by UNESCO in 2014 and recruited experts from UNESCO itself, but also from the GMR, the OECD, UNICEF and the World Bank. In many senses, while after 2014 LMTF 2.0—as the version came to be called—continued the debate at country level (Anderson, 2014), TAG adopted the work of the original LMTF with its focus on ‘seven learning domains, and recommendations for global measurement areas’ (Anderson, 2014). Chaired by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, TAG was a much smaller grouping, with its membership limited to IO experts, and with the task to devise the ‘post-2015’ indicator agenda.

From March 2014 to May 2015, the TAG embarked on the process of mapping existing and potential education indicators, taking into consideration both their alignment with the (anticipated) targets and questions of data availability. Importantly, the work of the TAG benefitted from the input of a global consultation process, running from November 2014 to January 2015. In May 2015 the group’s proposal was incorporated to the Framework for Action at the WEF in Incheon. That was a pivotal moment for the group’s continuity, since the WEF recommended that the TAG is expanded, in order to include civil society and UNESCO member states organisations’ representatives. It was partly the distrust towards the IOs leading the measurement agenda by the EFA actors, and partly the universalistic and participatory agenda of the SDGs that had brought this significant change, which also led to the renaming of TAG as the ‘Extended TAG’. Subsequently, the Extended TAG conducted ongoing open consultations led by regional leaders. Very quickly, what was a small, rather swift and efficient technical team of IO experts and representatives (with their own of course internal conflicts and competitions) had suddenly opened up to a much larger governing structure that required coordination, continuity, funding, support, meaning and a sense of purpose and unity: in other words, it became a complex infrastructure, ever expanding and changing, but always propping up and pushing the work of numbers.

Areas of concern for ETAG related to the issue of whether ‘temporary placeholder’ indicators should be devised, especially in relation to the lack of a universally comparable metric for learning outcomes. Above all, a major qualitative difference had already taken place in comparison to the previous education MDGs: five of the seven SDG4 targets now focused on learning outcomes and skills, a major departure from previous targets which focused on access and completion. In 2016, with the new SDG4 agenda formally adopted, the ETAG shifted again, giving rise to the Technical Cooperation Group (TCG), with the same broad membership (UIS, 2017) and remaining operative to date.

Additionally, in parallel to the TCG, another group came into existence, following in the footsteps of the LMTF: this was the ‘Global Alliance for Monitoring Learning’ (or GAML in short), the successor of the LMTF. Also created in 2016, GAML was originally defined as an ‘umbrella initiative to monitor and track progress towards all learning-related Education 2030 targets’ (UIS, 2016, p. 49), and was tasked with the development of tools, methodologies and shared standards to measure learning outcomes in the context of SDG4. Following the TCG, its membership is open to any individual or organisation willing to contribute to the work of GAML, and includes IOs, civil society organisations, a variety of technical partners and assessment organisations, and representatives of United Nations (UN) Member States.

Therefore, the political game of numbers became too high-stakes to leave it to the technical experts only. Even though the involvement of the majority of these actors, as the next section will show, was generally passive, the language of the new indicators became the new episteme—a way of knowing, describing and communicating about the world that was not merely about the craft of numbers (the techne) but involved the production of a new governing paradigm—a complex infrastructure of meetings, inscriptions, committees, agreements, supported by a growing number of networks of actors with different ideas, interests and alliances.

4 The Key Role of the Meeting

The transition from the ETAG to the TCG and from the LMTF to GAML were not without problems. Some original members of the TAG saw the TCG as a marker of the increasingly politicised nature of the indicators debate. At the same time, certain countries represented in the TCG and in GAML perceived that their input had not been sufficiently taken into consideration but simply used for rubber-stamping purposes. Others saw their role as primarily watchdogs, rather than full participants in the process. A civil society representative—involved in the TCG over a long period of time—elaborated on such tensions in the excerpt below:

We were of course invited to be part of this, which was a clever move because we had probably been, if not the, at least one of the most critical voices in the room. So we had a dilemma and ended up actually agreeing to be part of this committee … I think what we struggle with is the fact that we know that just by being in the room, we are giving an indirect blessing of what the […] is doing. And at the same time, if we are not in the room, then we have no access to the conversations. We don’t know what’s going on. (Civil society, 1)

Thus, in this last empirical section, this chapter offers some observations on the procvess and practice of these groups’ gatherings as the site where social, technological and material elements come together and stabilise these political spaces. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s idea of the ‘poetics of power’ (Geertz, 1980) is useful for unravelling the thick layer of dramaturgy coating this apparently technocratic regime. Several of the study’s interviewees suggested that most meetings are performative events, which follow a certain ritual, allowing enough free space to conclude with some loose decisions that determine the agenda for the follow-up meeting. The predominance of interviewees suggested that there is a clear-cut distinction between participants from the Global North, whose presence and contributions dominate the meetings, whilst representatives from countries of the Global South most of the time have a very passive presence, if any at all. This of course does not negate the agency and power of participants from the Global South, especially in relation to exploiting their own perceived weak positioning in order to accomplish specific goals.

Further, the ambiguity and informality of the process, despite being an issue for some in the room, becomes a valuable, malleable tool in ensuring participation, while at the same time also pushing on with a specific agenda. Interestingly, however, frustration and discord about the lack of transparency are not sufficient reasons to disassociate oneself from these alliances; being present at the discussions even when one is at the receiving end is still considered more valuable than not participating in such meetings:

Are we working on consensus basis? How do we deal with the fact that so many people have a conflict of interest? Who will draw conclusions? If there’s voting, with what numbers would something have to be supported for it to be carried? And this was a frustration that grew as every session basically just ended with a broad sweeping, this was a very good discussion, thanks guys. And it was never really clear what anything would result in. (Civil society, 2)

Meetings are therefore key sites, where multiple levels of the infrastructure come together: material inscriptions in the form of data, PowerPoints, documents distributed prior and during the meeting, as well as the production and pursuit of common meaning and aims. A plethora of actors come together, irrespective of their own interests and ideas, in order to achieve a compromise, specific enough ‘to keep the game going’ (Bourdieu, 1990), but also flexible enough so that can be adapted and translated in their own contexts. Not everyone’s participation has the same centrality and weight in these proceedings, nonetheless the expansion of actors is necessary in order to create some, even partial agreement and continuity (Grek, 2020a). As Luhmann suggested (1969), this is legitimacy achieved via procedure: meeting by meeting, compromise by compromise, the epistemic infrastructure achieves more than just the production of knowledge for policy: instead, it slowly shifts the needle towards a new, paradigmatic policy change. In the case of the SDG4, as we have seen, it was the fundamental policy shift from the measurement of access and enrolment data to the data and policy emphasis on learning outcomes. Chart 1 represents how some of these meetings and their actors are represented visually (orange squares represent meetings, whereas blue circles represent individual participants).

Chart 1
figure 1

Social network analysis of SDG4 meetings

Full size image

The visual depiction of how actors are connected through meetings is helpful here because it allows us to explore the ways that some actors are central (measured through their participation in most meetings) versus those that are more peripheral and those that might have attended only one or two meetings. Frequency of attendance denotes a more key positioning within the infrastructure, whereas less active participants are no less important; their inclusion and participation at least in some of the meetings adds legitimacy to the project and strengthens the infrastructure as a politically sanctioned operation. As clearly illustrated in this visualisation—the meetings played the key role in establishing the infrastructure by linking the actors, creating interdependencies between the organisations and establishing the stable flows of knowledge and power.

5 Discussion

This chapter has focused on the second order of the epistemic infrastructure (as outlined in the Introduction); that is, the role of interlinkages between actors in order to create not only a stable framework for measuring education but rather to establish it as a governing space in its own right. In order to make sense of the role of connections, networks and interdependencies in global public policy and their quantified enactments, one needs to highlight the main characteristics of SDG 4, as well as differences from previous similar initiatives. For a start, SDG 4 could be seen as a prime example of a transnational soft regulatory instrument (in the tradition of ‘soft’ law, i.e., best practices, expert standards, rankings, ratings, audits, quality assurance and the like). As such, it creates competitive and reputational pressures on those participating—by participants here we do not mean just country representatives, but also actors who work in the field, from the different IOs, research agencies and civil society. Similar to many other global monitoring tools, the Education 2030 Agenda (SDG 4) is interventionist in nature, leading effectively to a mutually constitutive relationship of the statistics and the countries they are meant to represent.

However, this chapter has also extensively discussed the ways in which SDG 4 is substantially different from other quantification exercises. The construction of SDG 4 represents a leap in the practice of transnational soft regulation in education because, although prescriptive, it also appears as transparent, pluralistic, open and developmental—consensus-making is prioritised and data collection and validation processes are required to be ‘democratic’. “SDGs and the Politics of Reconciling the Dual Logic of Democracy and Technocracy” chapter discussed the ways in which the centrifugal forces of technical and political accountability have given shape to the epistemic infrastructure of the SDGs and the different actors’ positionings and political work within it.

At the heart of this chapter are the paradoxes and the multiple ambivalences that quantification brings to the building of the epistemic infrastructure in education. On the one hand, they are necessary for the construction of discursive coalitions of actors who are not known to each other or have not collaborated before. Further, as we have seen above, SDG 4 identifies a specific failure of all previous statistical large-scale projects to deliver equitable education and develops a manifest governing programme to influence the behaviour of the participating actors. It may be that interventions still appear restricted to pushing (and largely financing) the statistical capacity for nations to produce data for governing; this step is seen as (and indeed is) key in achieving ‘transformative’ change. Thus, this chapter examines the promotion of SDG 4 as the emergence of an epistemic infrastructure that transcends the national/international/state/non-state divides. Crucially, this is not a governing structure that sits ‘on top of’ national and local decision-making, but has the very explicit aim of achieving national agendas capable of replacing current policies with ones which will deliver on the targets of SDG 4.

Nevertheless, these processes are not smooth and linear. As the empirical material shows, the process of establishing networks and interdependencies necessary for establishing the epistemic infrastructure involves antagonistic relationships of all the actors involved, and increasingly so, given the universal aspirations of the agenda and its claims to ‘democratise’ data monitoring for all the participant nations (as we have shown in “SDGs and the Politics of Reconciling the Dual Logic of Democracy and Technocracy” chapter). Lack of resources creates enormous frustrations and limitations; in many ways it necessitates the use of pre-existing data. This creates pressures in the relationships of the four major IOs (UNESCO, OECD, UNICEF and the World Bank), since they have to coordinate their work in a context not only restricted by limited budget availability, but also under conditions of attacks on their expertise. How is one to make sense of how this complex infrastructure of transnational governance comes into being? In other words, in conditions where the policy area to be governed is fluid and constantly shifting, how is one to analytically explain how these multi-party, polycentric, transnational and often inter-cultural networks of governance function?

The ambiguity of numbers which describe and simultaneously prescribe allows participant actors to perform their function as transnational actors who can simultaneously take part in collective decision-making and maintain their own particular register of the meeting and its aims and decisions. Although the non-existence of any ‘rules of the game’ is often seen in the literature as an ‘institutional void’ (Hajer, 2003), where actors have to make up the rules and processes as they go along, this chapter suggests that quantification is precisely the necessary underlay in the construction of a relatively stable epistemic infrastructure where an emblematic issue, such as equal and quality education for all, brings actors together in an almost religious mission with strong moral undertones. Statistical knowledge in this instance, in the form of the specific targets and indicators constructed, despite being scarce, contested and sometimes altogether absent, still fulfils a key role in symbolically representing a much larger and complex political problem and serves to unite actors in the quest for ‘solutions’.