Perhaps one of the most challenging notion to take on board in the governance of today’s world is that not all that counts can be counted. We increasingly rely on numbers as shortcuts to information about the world that we do not have time to digest.
Unfortunately, we are being led down the wrong path by the United Nations and its experts. In 2014, the U.N. High-Level Panel delivered its report with recommendations for the Sustainable Development Goals, subsequently to be adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 2015. One small aspect of the report very soon caught everyone’s attention. Buried on page 8 was a call for a “data revolution” in development. It generated a frenzy of enthusiasm among the international development community.
Later the same year the secretary-general’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development put forward its recommendation, titled “A world that counts.” The report laid out a grand ambition: It recognized that currently “whole groups of people are not being counted and important aspects of people’s lives and environmental conditions are still not measured.”
From that acknowledgement it took a surprising next step. From now onwards, the report declared, “Never again should it be possible to say, ‘We didn’t know.’ No one should be invisible. This is the world we want — a world that counts.”
The name of the game is governance “as if” the world counts. It might be a smart shortcut sometimes, but we are in deep trouble if we forget that we are doing it “as if” the world counts. Leadership should take making good decisions seriously. If the method by which we get knowledge and the method by which we make decisions is limited to what can be numbered, we are setting up a system of governance that’s systematically getting stuff that actually counts wrong.
Arguably, the most important things in this world are the things that we cannot count. The most marginalized issues are those issues that, willfully or not, remain and will remain uncounted. That should be first principle when it comes to making plans for global governance. Yet, on expert advice, the U.N. did exactly the opposite. In the year 2000 the world adopted the eight Millennium Development Goals, 18 targets and 60 indicators, and this year, intoxicated on what the establishment perceived as a ringing success, laid down the path for the next 15 years with 17 goals, 169 targets and so far 269 suggested indicators.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk. You can adjust all of your cookie settings by navigating the tabs on the left hand side.
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
Google Analytics
Some sites at blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk use Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages. The data help us improve the experience of using our site.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Privacy and cookies policy
Please see the School of Social and Political Science's privacy and cookies page. In addition to the cookies described there, blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk also uses the following cookies:
WordPress: wordpress_test_cookie
WordPress is the content management system (CMS) used to build blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk
Wordfence: wordfence_verifiedHuman, wfvt_
Wordfence is a WordPress security package
Twitter: personalization_id, guest_id, external_referer, ct0, _twitter_sess
Twitter is a microblogging social media service
Recent Comments