Statistical capacity development and the production of epistemic infrastructures

Abstract

Designating statistical capacity development as a target for measurement in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) created a dilemma for statistical decision-makers in the United Nations system, as some saw the inclusion of statistical capacity in SDG17 as a “conflict of interest,” making their work both a goal of the SDGs and a means to achieve them. In 2022, there are five indicators for measuring both the statistical capacity of individual countries and the support provided to strengthen it, including one indicator for measuring a country’s ability to monitor the SDGs themselves. In this article, I argue that the epistemic infrastructuring of statistical capacity into the SDG framework is a privileged case. By parsing the interconnections between the data, actors, networks, and processes that constitute statistical capacity on national and global levels, we can understand how central these materialities and processes are in constituting the larger policy agenda of the SDGs as well as debates over the problems that statistical capacity is meant to solve. Like all indicators in the SDG framework, statistical capacity indicators are performative – defined and delineated by the global statistics community that also helps define and delineate the SDG framework’s development problems. Unlike other indicators, however, statistical capacity indicators have the added weight of also producing the conditions of possibility for the “SDG framework itself.” In this way, debates over what constitutes statistical capacity and its strengthening are also debates about ownership of policy agendas and where tensions between the local and global erupt.

The rise of the reflexive expert? Epistemic, care-ful and instrumental reflexivity in global public policy

“…Quantified knowledge production in the context of the SDGs’ global public policy is expertise of a particular sort, ultimately shaped by official decisions discussed by various stakeholders at and ratified by voting members of the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC). The ‘global statistical community’ represented at the UNSC includes members of national statistical offices, of statistical divisions of IOs and of civil society organisations (Bandola-Gill et al, 2022; Tichenor, 2022). Data production for monitoring the SDGs also demanded that UN agencies do the work of ‘harmonisation’ between ‘local’ and ‘global’ statistics: ‘a process through which a variety and diversity of national statistics become translated into one global number’ (Bandola-Gill et al, 2022: 42).…”

“…The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This manuscript is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, under grant agreement No 715125 METRO (ERC-2016-StG) ('International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field -2022.…”

Our common metrics? Our Common Agenda report and the epistemic infrastructure of the Sustainable Development Goals

“…More recently, a theoretical lens of epistemic infrastructure started to gain prominence in the literature on the politics of numbers (Bueger, 2015; Tichenor, 2022). The concept of an infrastructure—initially developed in Science and Technology Studies (Ruhleder & Star, 1996)—moves the theoretical lens from numbers and their specific effects to broader systems of knowledge production (cf.…”

“…Thus, one of the key reasons why the SDGs were infrastructuralised lay in the fact that they managed to involve a broad coalition of actors in the seemingly technical process of developing indicators (Tichenor, 2022). The balancing act between democracy and technocracy of the SDGs has vast consequences—epistemic ones (in terms of the technical quality of the indicator frameworks) but also political ones (in terms of enhancing participation in the development of metrics beyond the narrow expert group of the IOs) (Bandola‐Gill et al, 2022).…”

Failure Privilege in Policymaking: Exploitation, (In)visibilization, and Future Projection in Abortion Policy in Poland

“…The visibility of certain failures and setbacks at the expense of others is an inherent effect of algorithmization and the construction of indicators as tools of crisis governance. There is "statistical capacity" 54 and power in rendering visible as invisible or in supporting invisibility. Privilege sets in whenever statistics and indicators are employed as part of crisis and failure exploitation to support certain framings, narratives, and power relations.…”