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Knowledge and Politics in Setting and Measuring the SDG s: Introduction to Special Issue
Author(s) -
FukudaParr Sakiko,
McNeill Desmond
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
global policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.602
H-Index - 33
eISSN - 1758-5899
pISSN - 1758-5880
DOI - 10.1111/1758-5899.12604
Subject(s) - transformative learning , politics , negotiation , political science , democracy , economic justice , meaning (existential) , public relations , corporate governance , set (abstract data type) , power (physics) , sociology , epistemology , computer science , economics , law , management , pedagogy , philosophy , programming language , physics , quantum mechanics
The papers in this special issue provide accounts of the politics and knowledge that shaped the Sustainable Development Goals ( SDG s). 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.