Keywords

Through an extensive discussion of the intertwinement of the multiple SDG policy arenas, actors and measurements, this book attempted to unpack the constitutive elements of the epistemic infrastructures of global public policy. The starting point of our analysis was the observation that, since knowledge and governance are closely interlinked (Jasanoff, 2004), an exploration of the epistemic base of any monitoring programme is central to an understanding of its structure and its governing effects over time. Conversely, an exploration of significant shifts in the production of global public policy requires a closer focus on the knowledge structures underpinning it. However, as the chapters of this book have shown, this is not merely a focus on ‘evidence-making’, which has been at the centre of the literature on public policy or the sociology of quantification thus far. On the contrary, this book has shown how, in the context of the SDGs, the production of global public policy must be understood as a complex interplay of material, techno-political and organisational structures within which statistical and governing knowledge is produced. In other words, policy is not simply informed or influenced by the numbers produced to guide it; instead, it is the spaces of the production of measurement themselves that have become arenas for the formation of global public policy. Therefore, the concept of ‘epistemic infrastructure’ offers a useful lens for understanding how these spaces come to be and how they become influential.

The following sections of this concluding chapter will theorise the first and second ‘orders’ of analysis of epistemic infrastructures: they will focus on the materialities of measurement, as well as the actors, processes and interlinkages involved in the construction of the SDGs’ epistemic infrastructure. Of course, there is no neat separation of the two ‘orders’ in reality: rather, we use it here as a heuristic, since it is on the entanglements of the material, social, political and organisational components of the infrastructure that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are built. Finally, the last section will discuss the formation of global public policy as a paradigmatic governing shift: it will show how and why global public policy is radically changing, as tensions and complementarities between technocratic and democratic imperatives are brought to the fore and become sites of struggle and formation of new ways of doing governing.

1 First-Order Level: The Material Underpinnings of the Infrastructure

As Chaps. 2, 3 and 4 of this book showed, the epistemic infrastructure of the SDGs is grounded in particular types of material building blocks: these are the data and the techniques of its collection, indicators and their categorisation into different tiers, harmonised data flows, narratives and stories, data visualisations, minutes of meetings and all other relevant inscriptions. Within the epistemic infrastructure, these different elements interact within one system—as it is a mix of technical, social and organisational materialities continuously interplaying (Bowker et al., 2009). Crucially, the infrastructure as a system does not emerge at once but rather it is a prolonged process of uneven development—and consequently, some material elements of the infrastructure will become obsolete or outdated before the infrastructure emerges as a whole (Star & Ruhleder, 1996).

These elements are the foundation of the infrastructure: they act as material representations of the phenomena at the centre of the SDGs—including poverty, education, health, tourism, migration and the whole range of policy arenas that ‘sustainable development’ brings together. The process of measurement occurs through inscription, which according to Latour are ‘all the types of transformations through which an entity becomes materialised into a sign, an archive, a document, a piece of paper’ (Latour, 1999, p. 306). Numbers, indicators and data within the epistemic infrastructure of the SDGs are such inscriptions: consequently, they are both material and semiotic—they are the physical manifestations of the areas of interest of the SDGs, but at the same time, they aim to reflect and also actively construct the meaning of these phenomena themselves. As such, as we have shown, they are not strictly representational—they are not merely constructions of the real world, but rather they are entities in their own right (Power, 2015).

The processes of constructing and validating indicators for the SDGs—alongside their classification into different ‘tiers’, depending on their technical qualities, the datasets that support them, but also political negotiations and compromises—are a case in point here. The SDG indicators are material and semiotic constructions because they become the space where the legitimacy and political acceptance of the exercise is constituted: as we carefully detailed, the Tier system works to classify indicators, based on whether there is adequate data and an acceptable methodology for measuring them. “Knowledge Production for the SDGs: Developing the Global Indicators” chapter discussed the ways that although negotiations for ‘moving indicators up a tier’ is apparently the aim, in fact, it is Tier II and III indicators—as the key ‘placeholder numbers’—that enable and direct further action, even if still imprecise or incomplete. Consequently, Tier II and III indicators, as material-semiotic entities are not just failed numbers. Rather, they have significant generative power in terms of building the infrastructure: they are the subject of meetings (e.g., the High-Level Political Forums or Expert Group meetings), the focus of countless documents and analysis, and the reason for the development of networks, endless negotiations and consensus-building activities.

On the other hand, the book discussed the harmonisation of numbers as central to the process of epistemic infrastructuring. Although inherently requiring a specific social milieu, the process of commensuration is crucially a material practice that requires the numerical work of harmonisation in order to establish numbers that can govern (Espeland & Stevens, 1998; Bowker & Star, 2000; Timmermans & Epstein, 2010; Rottenburg et al., 2015). As “Harmonising Global Public Policy: Producing Global Standards, Local Data and Statistical Capacity Development” chapter showed, in the context of the SDGs, the material process of harmonising numbers is key to creating a unified field for global public policy. Along with the Inter-Agency and Expert Group for the Sustainable Development Goal Indicators’ (IAEG-SDGs’) work of harmonising methodologies, UN agencies have been given the responsibility for harmonising nationally produced data for the purposes of ‘international comparability’, to make available the means by which they ‘produce and validate modelled estimates’, and to coordinate with other International Organisations in order to verify such internationally comparable and sometimes imputed data (UNSD, 2017, p. 3). In order to compare social, economic, political or environmental conditions in geographically distinct locations, statisticians have to do the nitty-gritty, material work of harmonising data that may have been created with different methodologies, including different sampling techniques or different surveys. The book took a deep dive into explaining the process of producing metrics for the SDGs, in order to show the materiality and complexity of working with such diverse datasets to create knowledge for policy. Instead of glossing over these processes as mere ‘quantification’, we showed how, at least in the field of the SDGs, disagreement, ‘bad’ numbers and discontent are not hidden and avoided but they are used as key sites for creating scientific and even democratic legitimacy.

Unlike physical infrastructures needing stability, the material underpinnings of the epistemic infrastructure are powerful because they are mobile (Latour, 1986). A central ingredient contributing to the fluidity and malleability of the epistemic infrastructure is narrative-making. Here, the book traced the entanglements of numerical, discursive and visual narratives in the production of stories that can persuade, move and bring actors together in constructing future utopias of a sustainable world with no hunger, no inequality and education for all. Through the analysis of narrative-making in the context of the SDGs, we showed how the SDG agenda is not exclusively a performance monitoring project, limited to requiring participating countries to regularly provide progress data towards the set goals. Rather, more ambitiously, the SDGs are presented in these documents not only as a ‘governing’ programme but rather a governing programme where values take the front stage. They aim to be seen as necessary, ethical, participatory and local; in fact, documents produced around the SDG often give little emphasis on the numbers themselves. In this sense, our findings align with previous research that argues that the SDGs are actively constructed as ‘transformative’ (Fischer & Fukuda-Parr, 2019, p. 376).

Discursively, the production of statistical data is often absent in the documents we analysed. Yet, this is precisely what the materiality of texts and narratives are about: the construction of an epistemic infrastructure that involves the creation of a knowledge system about ways of converting ideas about social life into numbers (Merry, 2016). The new orthodoxy of numbers does not need discussion or description; it has become a routinised ‘way of doing things’ and a way of enveloping the monitoring programme with meaning. Thus, the material work of narratives is essential to the political work of staging of all those necessary, yet often informal, frontstage and backstage rituals: the rhetoric, symbols and images required for transforming a deeply pragmatic and technocratic endeavour into a compelling ‘story’ for the audiences within and beyond its immediate cast and confines.

An important characteristic of the SDG ‘story’, however, is that it does not have a specific ending; instead, as is more common in modern storytelling, the ‘story’ offers several different endings that one can choose from. Indeed, the role of the material underpinnings of the SDGs (including the elaborate system of indicators, targets, report cards, custodian agencies, etc.) is not to strive for completeness but rather to keep the infrastructure open, incomplete and in constant movement. This point was made poignantly by Lampland (2010), who argued that the process of rationalisation of a different socio-political domain does not necessarily mean that each stage is becoming more rational. Rather, there is a key role here to be played by the conditionality and transitionality of numbers. Incompleteness and an openness regarding the destination are motivating factors for keeping the measurement ‘story’ going.

Finally, the materiality of the infrastructure is invisible—it works when it becomes a taken-for-granted part of the background. As such, the infrastructure is visible when it breaks down—which is evident in cases where the contested SDG indicators and missing data are clearly visible in debates. As shown throughout the book, it was the indicators under debate and evaluation by custodian agencies and the IAEG-SDGs that produced extensive material in the form of open consultations, side meetings at the UN Statistical Commission or PowerPoint presentations. On the other hand, consensual measures are not visible—there is less material on them in these forms, and they simply become part of the reporting background. An important aspect of this (in)visibility of material components of the epistemic infrastructure is their missing parts—what is excluded from the infrastructure and why. This is what Bowker et al. (2009) referred to as the centrality of ‘articulation work’: the focus on what is missing and what is present in the infrastructure is not only a matter of (in)visibility but also a matter of strategic choice—or ignorance (McGoey, 2012). This is primarily the work of actors and networks, to whom we will turn next.

2 Second-Order Level: Interlinkages

At the second-order level of the epistemic infrastructure, ‘rituals of verification’ (Power, 1999) are conducted to link together the materialities of quantification—the indicators, the reports, the custodian agencies, the PowerPoint presentations and so on—into a web of relations, processes and practices. In Chaps. 5–7 of the book, we have shown how the concept of democracy has become central to these rituals of verification, how this network formation happens and how new forms of expert brokerage have become an engine for this formation. Presenting the constitution of the epistemic infrastructure at the second-order level in this way has allowed us to show how quantification in the SDG era has changed the way that different agencies in the global governance space—including United Nations agencies, member states, philanthropic organisations and civil society groups—engage with each other and produce a unified global public policy.

Drawing from actor-network theory (Callon, 1986) and the theory of epistemic communities (Haas, 1992), we argue that epistemic infrastructures are institutionalised through webs formed between human and non-human agents and the knowledge practices that institutionalise such webs. Dynamic intra- and inter-organisational relationships (Fox, 2000) are central to the SDGs’ global policy agenda. International organisations, member states and civil society groups and their quantification practices constitute an interdependent network for monitoring and producing globally agreed-upon goals, as we carefully outline in “SDGs and the Rise of an Epistemic Infrastructure: Actors’ Networks, Partnerships and Conflicts in the Education SDG” chapter. As has been visible throughout the book, the epistemic communities producing governing knowledge for the SDGs have become quite expansive, while previous definitions of communities in the global space have focused on the role that elite communities with specialist knowledge have on influencing national policy (Haas, 1992). As can particularly be seen in “SDGs and the Politics of Reconciling the Dual Logic of Democracy and Technocracy” chapter, a wide range of stakeholders must be engaged in open consultations for refining and classifying indicators for inclusion in the monitoring framework—thereby constituting spaces of quantification both as privileged governing zones and founding the legitimacy of the SDGs as a global agenda on the ethos of democracy. These new epistemic communities have been structured explicitly to include previously excluded voices from member states from the Global South, civil society representatives and philanthropic and bilateral donor organisations. In the global governance space, knowledge does not travel from elite technical communities to policy spheres; instead, the production of knowledge by and through the SDG epistemic infrastructure is an iterative practice and always a negotiation between the technical and the political. Through the SDGs’ particular form of network governance (Provan & Kenis, 2008), epistemic infrastructuring dedifferentiates these organisations and commensurates diverging social, political, economic and environmental phenomena through practices of data harmonisation. This is a continuous and often informal process, one of constant making and remaking of partnerships, connections and evidentiary claims.

Indeed, the notion of interdependency and collaboration amongst IOs was the starting point of the METRO investigation: in an increasingly interdependent, globalised world, IOs’ work until few years ago remained surprisingly autonomous. The SDGs transformed this previous insularity of major IOs; the SDGs’ governing architecture—with the sharing of responsibility between different IOs as the custodian agencies of the SDG indicators—led to a significant reconfiguration of how IOs produce metrics and brought them much closer together. It is at this level that we found that numbers—with their ability to simplify, stabilise and travel—reconfigure relationships, dependencies and structures of organisations and fields in fresh and politically salient ways. For International Organisations in particular, this has led to complex interdependencies, as they increasingly mobilise their resources through their interaction with other IOs with comparable knowledge-producing abilities and interests: an IO’s success may be seen as its power and influence over a larger regime of organisations that work towards specific policy directions, rather than through their insularity and autonomy (Raustiala & Victor, 2004).

Together with the requirement that IOs join forces in order to respond to global challenges came another demand: that of opening up the space of measurement as one that can and does facilitate democratic deliberation and engagement, especially for those previously excluded. These voices are representatives of countries, the civil society and especially actors from the Global South. As we explained in “SDGs and the Politics of Reconciling the Dual Logic of Democracy and Technocracy” chapter, this development was not a ‘natural’ and gradual development that followed on from previous work in the MDGs: rather, reconciliating measurement with inclusion of diverse and previously excluded voices was the flagship agenda of the SDGs, explicitly proclaimed and almost advertised as the key transformative change brought by the SDGs, as against the MDGs’ ethos and governance. Marrying technical and political accountability is, however, not a straightforward task: the book discussed the tensions arising from the co-existence of the two, separately demarcated, types of accountability logic. As we have seen, striving for both political and scientific legitimacy has stirred uneasy discussions amongst the main players in the field. We found that actors were apprehensive about whether they can maintain the legitimacy of their expertise, when faced with the demand for technocracy to be politically accountable, too. On the other hand, those actors who strive for more inclusive and diverse decision-making do not want to be seen as less legitimate, or as compromising the validity and robustness of the data produced.

Finally, we also saw the emergence of a different type and style of expertise, one that does not only require a statistical nous, but is also dependent on achieving political mediation and consensus: “Expert Brokers: SDGs and the Emergence of New Forms of Expertise” chapter discussed in detail the rise of many International Organisations’ experts as the key brokers ironing out discrepancies and disagreements both in scientific and in political terms. This kind of brokering expertise, walking on the tight rope of technical and political accountability, has been the fuel powering the epistemic infrastructure, constantly creating new spaces of expansion and growth (Bandola-Gill, 2022).

However, what is it about the SDGs that unravel the accountability conundrum and require such intense brokering activity for governing of the transnational? For a long time, the legitimacy of the production of quantitative knowledge related solely to its robustness and trustworthiness. Despite the emergence of more politically driven criticisms focusing on the (min)uses and effects of such monitoring exercises, the debate on comparisons around country performance measurement, or the effects of these exercises on countries of the global South, tended to develop in a bifurcated way—with political and technical discussions neatly separated one from another, taking place in different spaces and relying on different parlances. Through proclaiming the SDGs as both a monitoring and democratic agenda, actors in this space have managed on the one hand to deal with the problem of power imbalances by creating a bottom-up narrative of development, whilst at the same time have diffused the problem by embracing it. The informality, multiplicity and dynamism of the epistemic and policy networks that bring the SDGs into being—as discussed in “SDGs and the Rise of an Epistemic Infrastructure: Actors’ Networks, Partnerships and Conflicts in the Education SDG” chapter—are built precisely on the ability to simultaneously use different discourses and accountabilities, depending on the context and participant actors. Therefore, as we have shown in this book, the space of the meeting becomes the key venue where the complex technical statistical work of validating data for indicators takes place, but also the space where these data are presented to national representatives for their approval. Thus, the SDGs are not just a performance monitoring tool, like others: their transformative power lies in their success to be prescriptive, yet also appear as transparent, pluralistic, open and ‘developmental’. In the end, it will matter little whether the goals are met or not—in having set up such a functioning, yet complex and fluid epistemic infrastructure, the SDGs are already successful in creating a unified global public policy and the means to build upon it.

To conclude, the epistemic infrastructure of the SDGs is built on a diverse set of actors and practices that ‘harmonise’ in a dual sense of the term—‘infrastructuring’ participatory governance and commensurating global public policy through the harmonisation of data production and indicator monitoring. It is certainly an open question whether this infrastructuring of participatory governance actually disrupts the power asymmetries that have long structured the relationships between UN agencies and countries in the Global North on the one hand, and countries in the Global South on the other. However, we argue that the epistemic infrastructure of the SDGs explicitly creates interdependencies between all these actors in the act of producing a common global public policy because of and despite these power differentials, making quantification the common denominator of global public policy in the process. The MDGs included eight goals that singled out development problems for member states in the Global South as conceived by organisations from the Global North, and they were focused much more on basic needs rather than promoting a platform for thriving. The SDGs produced a much more comprehensive global public policy space, and one which interpellated all countries as developing, thus producing a global governing paradigm. This is the third-order level of the epistemic infrastructure, discussed further in the next section.

3 Governing Numbers: Global Public Policy as a Paradigm Shift

The last half-century has seen immense social and political changes, such as the rise of globalisation, radical technological advancements and the shift from government to governance. Part and parcel of these changes has been the emergence of quantification as a way of knowing and governing highly dispersed, diverse and complex social realities. Indeed, quantification soon came to represent more than merely the measurement of people and practices. Rather, it emerged as the new way to govern: decision-making was not to be based on individual judgement, path dependency and a kind of ‘connoisseurship’ any longer. Instead, policymakers were encouraged to access new, evidence-based and international knowledge—or ‘best practice’, as it was often called. Different disciplines have richly analysed this radical change in the relationship of knowledge and policy and theorised on both its emancipatory but also distorting—and at times even destructive—effects. Quantitative knowledge—in all its manifestations, from data, to indicators and benchmarks, rankings and algorithms—came to be a key instrument in steering policy directions at all levels of government and often people’s own personal lives; it became all-encompassing and, for some, a force of social transformation in itself.

Thus, what is it about the SDGs as a global monitoring programme that is any different from quantification as we already know it? A quick, superficial analysis of the SDGs would see them as following the line of work which began with the MDGs; indeed, many still see the SDGs as simply the renewed commitment of nations to development, using goal-setting as the key instrument to nudge countries into increased attention to areas such as education and poverty (e.g., Muchhala & Sengupta, 2014). Contrary to such accounts, we approached the SDGs as transformational: their potential for change has been outlined both in the official documents and the literature on sustainable development. Fukuda-Parr and McNeill (2019), for example, have persuasively written about the inclusion of Global South in the monitoring decision-making and process, as a key new feature in global governance. We build on this literature and move beyond it, to suggest that the SDGs are transforming the production of global public policy: through the construction of the epistemic infrastructure that gives them both substance and meaning, as well as a future direction, they are shaping a new governing paradigm for and of global public policy.

However, how has this come about? As the different chapters in this book have discussed, the SDGs have brought the two constituting elements of global governance much closer together and in programmatic fashion: that is, on the one hand, the epistemological underpinnings that set the agenda of global public policy, and on the other, the governing architecture to produce it. By using the term ‘epistemic’ infrastructure (rather than measurement or knowledge infrastructure), our research highlighted the contribution of quantification to the rise of a broader epistemological agenda—one where quantification emerges as a cognitive scaffolding for thinking and understanding global problems by creating the conditions under which they become knowable. The arguments developed in this book showed how the notion of epistemic infrastructure has a double function: first, through bringing together discursive and numerical materialities, actors and networks, it captures larger epistemological questions; that is, the basic frames within which we understand the world and its challenges. Second, the epistemic infrastructure is instrumental in combining these new epistemologies with the structures and institutions that support, sustain and ultimately transform the measurement agenda into a decision-making space. Governing here is not just merely informed by numbers, or pursued by numbers. Instead, we see the SDGs as establishing a new governing paradigm, in that measurement (numbers) and governing are co-constructed: the measurement space is advocated and utilised as key space for achieving political consensus and shaping global public policy directions. New ideas emerge and bring new directions for envisioning and doing governing: interpretative flexibility, openness, (re)politicisation, reflexivity and democratisation are key discourses and proclaimed aims for the new governing paradigm that the SDGs represent. This is because the SDGs, analysed as an epistemic infrastructure, do not recast quantification merely as a tool in the arsenal of policy instrumentation and change. Instead, quantification is institutionalised as the very core of the governance of sustainable development.

Further, quantification in the context of the SDGs does not only represent the power of numbers to offer objective evaluations of the current state of the world. Although numbers have always been seen as powerful in their ability to offer neutral, a-political, fast and stable knowledge, giving legitimacy and authority to their producers and users alike, quantification within the SDGs represents a more fundamental shift than simply continuing to capitalise on the raw power of numbers to persuade. Instead, we see the proponents of quantification as gathering steam and building on the incremental gains achieved at the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, in order to consolidate the ideas, norms, values and cultures of the epistemic turn in global governance. Their efforts have resulted in a deep shift that now renders quantification of the sole and most powerful infrastructural complex that has acquired the qualities and affordances of a macro-social policy paradigm (Hall, 1993). Stated otherwise, quantification in global governance has consolidated previously disparate and even contradictory ideas into the making of a new leitmotiv, that can simultaneously be as complex as the vast datasets that feed it, or as simple as a new motto: ‘leave no one behind’. Such metaphors and all their attendant elaborations structure the future: in the context of global public policy and the SDGs, quantification has become embedded in processes, decision-making, monitoring and accountability mechanisms that cannot be ‘undone’. Decision-making in virtually all fields of global public policy takes place within the context of a particular set of ideas that recognise quantification as the governing frame that is more legitimate than others; as a result, quantification privileges, fosters and materialises some lines of policy direction over others.

Hence, we see the epistemic infrastructure of the SDGs as portraying a paradigmatic shift in the governance of global public policy. First, as this book has shown, the interdependencies of expert International Organisations, with country representatives, civil society, philanthropists and professional entities, have led to re-politicisation of quantification: the discourses of democratisation, participation, bottom-up country buy-in were a key fundamental change from the previous MDGs’ era. The SDGs were from the start premised on a new, horizontal structure, where countries were considered centre stage; that is, countries are not merely participants, but are—theoretically, at least—in charge of the process. Crucially, this shift was the outcome of struggle and of the determination of countries of the Global South to change the narrative.Footnote 1

Second, the SDGs acquired global scope and reach, as for the first time they framed development as not a requirement for the South only; instead, all countries are seen as continuously developing. Additionally, the scope of the agenda is much larger: goals have been set for a much larger spectrum of public policy arenas, even when there was no data to back up the vast majority of the goals put forward. More importantly, these policy arenas and the goals associated with them were seen as interlinked and as interacting with one another, giving rise to the emergence of a global public policy field centred around the notion of sustainability. Nonetheless, their translation into quantified targets soon gave rise to criticisms that some goals were contradictory and achieving one would be counterproductive for achieving another. Examples of such critique have primarily been expressed in relation to the economic growth goals contradicting the climate change or the global health ones (e.g., Hangoma & Surgey, 2019).

Third, as chapters in this book have shown, there is interdependency and fragmentation of the knowledge producers at the global stage. The range of producers of statistical knowledge for the SDGs has grown substantially: IOs, civil society, NGOs, national statistical offices, donors and others. These actors are required to work together, whilst simultaneously maintaining their unique contribution and presence in the field. Such polar demands have generated a complex knowledge production arena, that simultaneously works together to standardise and integrate, whilst continuously growing the need for expanding the statistical capacity of nations. Despite the construction of global measures, these numerous ‘statistical intermediaries’ (Tichenor, 2022) create a sense of fragmentation and disjointedness, often necessary for the governing of such complex and fluid procedures.

Fourth, the SDGs are not an add-on to national policies; instead, they enter national agendas by being re-contextualised within national priorities and plans. Each country is expected to nationalise the SDGs—to produce a measurement infrastructure that matches as closely as possible to the global SDG framework to shape and be shaped by national priorities. One of the key modes of monitoring and enforcing this nationalisation is through Voluntary National Reviews, which are annually presented to the UN High-Level Political Forum.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the SDGs are not merely a performance monitoring agenda, sitting alongside the plentiful other global indexes and measurement tools. The goals have become pervasive in the everyday discourse of public and private sector marketing and corporate branding, in civil society and generally in a multitude of social institutions which want to be seen as adhering to the principles of sustainability and equality. It is precisely this influential positioning that sets it apart from previous endeavours of this kind.

To conclude, as the nature and breadth of transnational links and networks have expanded and the global diffusion of ideas, standards and policy practice has intensified (Stone, 2008), we observe new and changing geographies of policy (Peck & Theodore, 2015). Despite the complexity, fragmentation and instability of global public policy, sets of ideas can and do develop considerable coherence and persistence at the international level (Kennett, 2010). The analytical lens of an epistemic infrastructure allows us to not only explain these expanding connections but also propose an alternative theorisation of what global public policy is. As argued in this book, the theorisation of global public policy as an infrastructure goes beyond understanding policy in terms of its content. Global public policy is not just an assemblage of decisions affecting the global sphere; rather, it should be understood as a set of epistemic (infra)structures enabling forms of knowledge production, decision-making and interlinkages between actors. In that sense, global public policy is a process of infrastructuring—creating materialities, interlinkages between actors and common logics for action through which problems can be constructed and future policy directions can be drawn.