This blog post is based on a talk at the SKAPE seminar on 2 May 2018<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n Perhaps one of the most challenging notion to take on board in the governance of today\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, we are being led down the wrong path by the United Nations and its experts. In\u00a02014, the U.N. High-Level Panel delivered its\u00a0report with recommendations<\/a>\u00a0for 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\u2019s attention. Buried on page 8 was a call for a \u201cdata revolution\u201d in development. It generated a frenzy of enthusiasm among the international development community.<\/p>\n Later the same year the secretary-general\u2019s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development put forward its recommendation, titled\u00a0\u201c<\/a>A world that counts<\/a>.\u201d The report laid out a grand ambition: It recognized that currently \u201cwhole groups of people are not being counted and important aspects of people\u2019s lives and environmental conditions are still not measured.\u201d<\/p>\n From that acknowledgement it took a surprising next step. From now onwards, the report declared, \u201cNever again should it be possible to say, \u2018We didn\u2019t know.\u2019 No one should be invisible. This is the world we want \u2014 a world that counts.\u201d<\/p>\n The name of the game is governance \u201cas if\u201d the world counts. It might be a smart shortcut sometimes, but we are in deep trouble if we forget that we are doing it \u201cas if\u201d 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\u2019s systematically getting stuff that actually counts wrong.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A blogpost by A blogpost by Morten Jerven (University of Edinburgh) This blog post is based on a talk at the SKAPE seminar on 2 May 2018 Perhaps one of the most challenging notion to take on board in the governance of today\u2019s world is that not all that counts can be counted. We increasingly …Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":260,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/skape\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/skape\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/skape\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/skape\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/260"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/skape\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/skape\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":302,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/skape\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions\/302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/skape\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/skape\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/skape\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.sps.ed.ac.uk\/skape\/files\/2018\/04\/numbers-300x280.jpg\")
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