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      Statistical entrepreneurs: the political work of infrastructuring the SDG indicators

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      Policy and Society
      Oxford University Press (OUP)

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          Abstract

          Governing by indicators has emerged as the predominant mode of global public policy. Consequently, global governance has become a field in which different indicators compete for policymakers’ and public attention. This begs a question—what makes some indicators successful when others become irrelevant? This paper explores this problem through the inquiry into the measurement of multidimensional poverty in Sustainable Development Goal 1 (“End poverty in all its forms everywhere”). In the field historically dominated by the World Bank’s dollar-per-day metric (currently 1.9$), multidimensional poverty measurement gained prominence, becoming one of the key measures of global poverty. By tracking the pathways to success of multidimensional poverty measurement—through qualitative interviews with actors in International Organisations this paper argues that the key quality of successful indicators is their ability to become parts of the broader epistemic infrastructure, linking political institutions, actors (including experts and policymakers), and data and statistics. The paper brings the focus on a specific set of actors—statistical entrepreneurs—who advocate for innovations in measurement and work toward creating such infrastructures, thus indirectly promoting new policy ideas reflected in the metrics.

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          Representing and Intervening

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            Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds

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              Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                (View ORCID Profile)
                Journal
                Policy and Society
                Oxford University Press (OUP)
                1449-4035
                1839-3373
                March 22 2022
                March 22 2022
                Affiliations
                [1 ]School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
                Article
                10.1093/polsoc/puac013
                9d27cead-bfa8-4261-b358-cd57394762a9
                © 2022

                https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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