Knowledge and Politics in Setting and Measuring the SDGs: Introduction to Special Issue

Sakiko Fukuda‐Parr and Desmond McNeill

Global Policy, 2019, vol. 10, issue S1, 5-15

Abstract: The papers in this special issue provide accounts of the politics and knowledge that shaped the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The open and transparent processes in the Open Working Group (OWG) and Post‐2015 agenda consultations challenged the MDG paradigm and set more transformative and ambitious goals. But across many goals, there was slippage in ambition when targets and indicators were selected. In some cases, this is due to genuine difficulty in defining a suitable indicator. In other cases, there is clearly a contestation about the agenda, and indicators are used to reorient or pervert the meaning of the goal. The accounts of the negotiations– concerning inequality, sustainable agriculture, access to justice, education, environment – show how the selection of an indicator is purportedly a technical matter but is highly political, though obscured behind the veil of an objective and technical choice. The papers also highlight how the increasing role of big data and other non‐traditional sources of data is altering data production, dissemination and use, and fundamentally altering the epistemology of information and knowledge. This raises questions about ‘data for whom and for what’ – fundamental issues concerning the power of data to shape knowledge, the democratic governance of SDG indicators and of knowledge for development overall.

Date: 2019
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (47)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12604

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:glopol:v:10:y:2019:i:s1:p:5-15

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1758-5880

Access Statistics for this article

Global Policy is currently edited by David Held, Patrick Dunleavy and Eva-Maria Nag

More articles in Global Policy from London School of Economics and Political Science Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().