Numbers as Utopia: Sustainable Development Goals and the making of quantified futures

Abstract

In this article, we argue that number-making is a mode of imagining political futures – not only futures that are probable but, crucially, futures that are desired. In this way, rather than simply a mode of ‘technicising’ policy challenges, quantification fleshes out the utopian dream of a better world. Global governance is faced with the paradox of, on one hand, the utopian aspiration of the Sustainable Development Goals to create a perfect world (free of poverty, inequality, diseases and climate disaster) and, on the other hand, the dystopian effects of inaction – both tracked carefully through a complex network of indicators. This article focuses on the materiality of the Sustainable Development Goals as a productive device through which a monitoring agenda such as the Sustainable Development Goals has become ever more influential and has led to the emergence of a global public policy space.

Introduction

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent the United Nations’ flagship goal-setting agenda, aiming to eradicate inequity and reverse climate change. The SDGs are incredibly ambitious in both scope and depth – across the 17 goals, 169 targets and 232 unique indicators, they outline a pathway to a world of economic, social and environmental prosperity. A growing body of literature (e.g. Bandola-Gill et al., 2022; Fukuda-Parr, 2016; Kanie and Biermann, 2017) has explored the key qualities, politics and power of the SDGs as tools of global governance. The SDGs are seemingly the apex of quantification as the predominant paradigm for global governance (Best, 2014; Merry, 2016) – a mode of technicising decision-making, dressed in the language of democratic participation of all stakeholders, including those from the global South. This is because the power of the SDGs has moved beyond ‘governing at distance’ (Miller, 2001) through quantification. Unlike its predecessor, the Millennium Development Goals, the process of producing numbers for the SDGs is significantly more collective and – ostensibly – democratic, with a growing number of actors involved in producing and evaluating its targets and indicators (Fukuda-Parr, 2016; Tichenor, 2022).

In this article, we build on Mennicken and Salais’ (2022) work on the puzzle of the ‘new’ politics of numbers, whereby quantification is simultaneously a subject of unprecedented growth and expansion as well as disillusionment and a decrease in trust. In particular, we consider two key questions: how does quantification enable a multiplicity of numerical goals and political values to come together in the construction of future governing vistas? How do the SDGs manage to become a motor of collective action and change (at least in theory – as we illustrate in the article), despite its seemingly technocratic character?

In order to answer these questions, we approach quantification as a mode of utopian thinking – a way of seeing, constructing and performing the ‘desired possible worlds’ of the future (Levitas, 1990). The vast body of literature on ‘governing by numbers’ has shown how, although numbers are inherently political, their politics is hidden behind – and legitimised by – the veil of technocracy (Porter, 1995). Measurement is not only descriptive but also prescriptive as it always invokes a desired course of action (Kingsbury et al., 2012). Thus, numbers are performative as they implicitly construct rather than simply measure political phenomena (MacKenzie, 2008; Mehrpouya and Samiolo, 2016; Tichenor, 2017). However, the literature has also – at least recently – examined the power of numbers to enhance democracy by giving political voice and power to those that did not have it before (Mennicken and Salais, 2022). In this article, we move beyond the performative versus emancipatory logics of quantification (Espeland and Stevens, 1998) in order to examine the materiality of number-making as a form of future-making: more specifically, we focus on the ways that quantification facilitates governing the present, through the making of utopian futures. It is important to stress from the start that we do not examine utopian thinking as a pointless dreamy exercise, which is a frequent criticism for the term. Instead, we follow Jameson’s ‘Politics of Utopia’ and Levitas’ ‘Utopia as Method’ to reflect on the potential of utopian thinking to still have a social function; specifically, we ask what is the function that utopia-making may have in the realm of the quantification of global policy challenges.

Therefore, the article examines number-making as a mode of imagining a political future – not the future that is probable but also (or perhaps predominantly), a future that is desired (cf. Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2022). Our focus is on the paradox of, on one hand, a utopian aspiration of the SDGs to create a world free of poverty, inequality, diseases and climate disaster and, on the other hand, a dystopian vision of inaction – both of which can be tracked carefully through a complex network of indicators. Here, paradoxically, quantification is not simply a technical exercise: rather than just seen as facilitating de-politicisation or, on the contrary, assisting collective action, the SDGs have created a material space of interaction, motored by utopian thinking and the hope of a better tomorrow. It is the materiality and procedural character of numbers as utopia that is focal point of analysis in this article.

Specifically, we empirically examine two routes through which utopian futures are materially produced. First, the materiality of numbers is enacted through the provisionality of number-making within the SDGs. As we will discuss, the SDGs allowed participating actors the space to construct multiple global goals without checking the availability of data sources before embarking with the endeavour. As a result, the process of validating data and constructing indicators has been a long one, often allowing the use of provisional and ‘placeholder’ numbers as a way of finding consensus, trying to piece the puzzle bit by bit (despite missing data) and hence creating the conditions to open up a largely technocratic process to a discussion of not only what was measurable, but of what was politically desirable, too. Surprisingly, this provisionality and fluidity of numbers did not challenge their dominance; on the contrary, as our second empirical case shows, quantification emerged as the great unifier of data and political values and aspirations. Indeed, the SDGs’ narrative production machine, as the article’s second empirical case shows, used numerical inscriptions discursively in order to produce ambitious aspirations for the future of education: through the production of specific targets and goals, it used numbers to materially envelop the narrative of a utopian educational wonderland for all.

When emphasising the ‘materiality’ of number-making and utopia, we are using the concept somewhat differently than some scholars have used it in the context of sustainability reporting standards and frameworks (e.g. Cooper and Michelon, 2022). Instead, we mobilise this term in an infrastructural sense, building on our previous work on epistemic infrastructures (Bandola-Gill et al., 2022). In conceptualising materiality, we build on Latour’s concept of inscription, which are ‘all the types of transformation through which an entity becomes materialised into a sign, an archive, a document, a piece of paper’ (Latour, 1999: 306). Therefore, by ‘materiality’ we mean the material inscriptions of the SDGs: ‘data and the techniques of its collection, indicators and their categorization into different tiers, reports, scorecards, PowerPoint presentations, minutes of meetings, and all other relevant inscriptions’ (Bandola-Gill et al., 2022: 435).

Furthermore, we should explain that by ‘utopian’, we refer to ambitious political imaginaries. To a large degree and in contrast with other monitoring exercises in the past, the SDGs also represent elaborate utopian visions of interconnected policy futures, rather than a set of isolated targets. This article – through a qualitative study of quantification in global governance drawing on a large corpus of qualitative data (including documents and semi-structured interviews with key experts in International Organisations) – focuses on the ways that the SDGs facilitate Levitas’ three functions of utopia-making: that is, the ways they enable change, criticism and compensation. Second, we will show how the materiality of quantification serves as the springboard for the ‘utopian leap’: the way that the sheer pleasure of construction counteracts the paralysis of reality and fills the gap between a dreary present and the ideal arrangements of a desired future. Here, we follow Jameson when he claims that ‘utopia is either too political or not political enough’ (Jameson, 2004: 40); in other words, and as we will discuss, it may not be very dissimilar from the SDGs.

We develop this argument in the following steps: the next section briefly accounts for the birth of the SDGs: how they came about and what they sought to change. The following section outlines the key bodies of scholarship on which we build our theoretical framework. In the empirical section, the article summarises the role and key characteristics of the SDGs as a quantified future-making project. Using the case of the SDGs and the statistical and data systems that power them, we show how, first, new materialities of numbers are produced in the effort to delineate and measure a future yet unlived; second, we trace the expansion, interdependencies and new forms of participation of the actors involved in the process; and finally, using the case of education, we discuss the role of narratives in the construction of dystopian imaginaries that necessitate radical action. The article then concludes with a discussion of the interplay between utopia and dystopia as a central mode of governing the future by numbers.

From ‘governing by numbers’ to the utopia of ‘sustainable development’

We argue that the SDGs became the first truly global policy agenda, as the United Nations (UN) alleged that ‘never before have world leaders pledged common action and endeavour across such a broad and universal policy agenda’ (UNGA, 2015: 4). How did this come to be? The Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), agreed upon by 189 UN member states with the Millennium Declaration in 2000, were widely critiqued as driven by a small number of powerful political entities (the United States, Europe and Japan) in order to effect change exclusively in poor countries (Amin, 2006; Saith, 2006). For 15 years, the MDGs largely defined development priorities for multilateral, bilateral and philanthropic organisations in the Global South, creating a donor-led vision of global progress. For this reason, although the MDGs were widely heralded for highlighting poverty reduction and social development as the most important development problems of the new millennium, they were also criticised for being ‘reductionist’ and for framing ‘development as a top-down approach to meeting basic needs, promoting a target driven strategy, and [de-contextualizing] from local settings’ (Fukuda-Parr and McNeill, 2019: 8).

On the contrary, from the beginning, the 2030 Agenda with its SDGs was designed to be country driven. With this priority in mind, the SDGs were developed through two parallel consultancy processes, the Secretary General-run ‘Post-2015 Development Agenda’ and the Open Working Group (OWG) that emerged from the Rio + 20 Conference on the Environment and Development. The ‘MDG plus’ that was to emerge from the UN-led ‘Post-2015 Development Agenda’ was conceived to be much the same as that which came before, while the OWG was much more revolutionary in the ‘structural change’ of the country-led coalition, which called for working towards issues of ‘poverty, environmental sustainability, economic development, and social equity’ – going far beyond a focus on ‘basic needs’ (Fukuda-Parr and McNeill, 2019: 9). Thus, it became very important that the SDGs were country-led, and that the UN agencies that had been in the driver’s seat for the MDGs give up the wheel for countries to lead the process. Fundamentally, the SDGs replaced the MDGs’ poverty agenda with an agenda for ‘sustainable development’, under the banner of ‘country-ownership’ of the project (Fukuda-Parr, 2016).

This utopia of sustainable development demanded everyone at the table, establishing that all countries have the responsibility to act on these policy items, and was described in this way (United Nations General Assembly, 2015: 3–4):

In these Goals and targets, we are setting out a supremely ambitious and transformational vision. We envisage a world free of poverty, hunger, disease and want, where all life can thrive. We envisage a world free of fear and violence. A world with universal literacy. A world with equitable and universal access to quality education at all levels, to health care and social protection, where physical, mental and social well-being are assured. A world where we reaffirm our commitments regarding the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation and where there is improved hygiene; and where food is sufficient, safe, affordable and nutritious. A world where human habitats are safe, resilient and sustainable and where there is universal access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy.

Because the SDGs are also a monitoring agenda, these ambitious goals and targets were then required to be actualised through indicators and the data used to populate them. There are two essential supranational governing bodies and orders of operation in the construction of the SDGs, and the process of setting the goals and targets and the process of setting the indicators was split from the start. The first governing body is perhaps the most obvious: the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), whose membership is made up of decision-makers representing all 193 UN member states. It was the UNGA that deliberated, chose and ratified the SDGs’ 17 goals and 169 targets in 2015 (UNGA, 2015) – without consideration of the indicators used to measure progress towards these targets.

The second key governing body is the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC), whose membership is made up of representatives of National Statistical Offices (NSOs) from 24 voting UN member states spread equitably over official UN geographic regions. Each member state serves 4 years, but representatives from other member states, International Organisations and civil society attend the UNSC each year as observers and contribute to deliberation. Once the UNGA had determined the goals and targets, the UNSC and its working groups became responsible for deliberating and choosing – and passing on to the UNGA for ratification – the 232 unique indicators, their methods and their data sources that are used to measure progress on each of these targets. A key UNSC working group – the Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IEAG-SDGs) – was created to put decision-making power into the hands of representatives from NSOs rather than international organisations in the materialising of each individual indicator. Although those within the system might argue that this then separates the political from the technocratic, both forms of accountability shape decisions made by statisticians at the UNSC (Bandola-Gill, 2021; Bandola-Gill et al., 2022).

Thus, along with the utopian nature of the content of the global agenda, utopia was also woven into its organisational fabric. SDGs’ utopia-building of a horizontal decision-making process materialises in the ways policy items are quantified and populated. In explicit terms, the membership of the IAEG-SDGs was structured to make sure that the decision-making power sat with UN member states and that this membership was regionally representative, including rotating membership and co-chairs. Voting members in this working group have the final say in validating methods and data sources for the SDGs’ final indicators, whose methods and data sources are proposed by the UN agencies who serve as ‘custodians’ for each indicator. Furthermore, custodian agencies develop methods and data sources for each indicator in consultation with national statistics systems representatives, civil society and other International Organisations (IOs).

Interestingly, the SDGs’ core agenda from the very beginning adopted one of the key elements of utopian thinking: one of the most durable oppositions in utopian projections has always been between technology and nature, or between the destructive character of human development versus a return to ‘Mother Earth’, the heavenly Garden of Eden. There is no question that the SDGs have their origin in the Rio + 20 conference in 2012, meant to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development – the ‘Earth Summit’ (Dodds et al., 2012, 2017). The Rio Earth Summit was the culmination of a movement towards the prioritisation of protecting the environment from unsustainable modes of economic development, with some authors arguing from the very start about the fantasy of reconciling growth with ecological concerns: this was described as a ‘utopia of a society where no obvious concessions are necessary’ (Quental et al., 2011: 16).

Theoretical underpinnings: Measuring futures, building utopias

Following the centrality of setting a future agenda for a number of policy goals by the SDGs, how can the literature on future-making cast light on its relationship to quantification? Aradau and Van Munster (2011) argued that efforts to predict future catastrophic events, from terrorism to climate change, have significantly stretched the imaginative capacities of governments, while simultaneously allowing the development of practices at present which become part of the ‘preparedness’ and ‘resilience’ for the future. Poli distinguishes between ‘forecasting, foresight and anticipation’ as the primary three levels of futures study. First, forecasting is ‘the properly predictive component of futures study’ (Poli, 2019); it can be found in either short-term modelling of the future (e.g. econometric modelling) or longer models, such as climate change ones. Such forecasting is primarily quantitative and tends to assume continuity, or what Poli calls ‘past-based’ futures – an extrapolation that the laws governing the phenomena under question will remain the same. Second, foresight is characterised differently, as it includes ‘most traditional’ futures studies. Foresight studies are mostly qualitative, and they are not meant to predict but instead construct ‘a variety of possible futures’. According to Poli (2019: 7), ‘foresight exercises are primarily used to challenge the mindset of decision-makers by exploring possible futures’. Finally, the notion of anticipation and anticipatory governance have been central to the study of futures: anticipation is ‘grounded on the outcomes resulting from forecast and foresight models and aims at implementing them into decisions and actions’ (Poli, 2019). Miller (2018: 2) comments, ‘The future does not exist in the present but anticipation does. The form the future takes in the present is anticipation’. Interestingly, Miller (2018: 59) also noted that anticipatory governance is the knowledge and skill of how to ‘use-the-future’. However, as he suggests, to ‘use the future is strictly speaking, not possible, since the future does not exist as an object or tool to be used. The future as anticipation, however, is continuously instrumentalised’.

Although these phenomena and their management are of high significance in the analysis of contemporary governance practices, this article analyses specifically the role of numbers as the key building block in the making of future forecasts. Indeed, as we will see, the point of the forecasting exercise is essentially different from achieving mere prediction and ‘readiness’; rather than offering the reading of a crystal ball, narrating the future involves establishing a discursive agenda of the values of the present, and the ideas and ambitions of how future generations will live. In bringing together these futuristic stories, narrating the future becomes essentially a governing manifesto of contemporary considerations, uncertainties and potentialities. By quantifying these futures, actors in this field establish a common utopia whose progress towards which can be carefully measured, as well as demand accountability to stay on track.

Thus, the article considers two key questions: how does quantification enable the multiplicity of numerical goals and political values to come together and create future governing vistas? How does it manage to become a motor of utopian thinking (at least in theory – as we illustrate in the following section), despite its seemingly technocratic character? What if quantification was seen as inherently a process of creating a utopia? For example, as argued by Mennicken and Salais (2022: 10–11):

Utopias could be said to set forth a horizon of expectations that is believed to open a new future viewed as enlarging and facilitating the actions of those who form it, ultimately aimed at making them more powerful. These can be scientists, philosophers, ideologues, managers, politicians, all people who more or less occupy the role of ‘conseillers du prince’ in government matters. Policy-driven quantification often carries with it a utopian perspective. It is implicated in the promise and dream of creating an infrastructure that can facilitate the making of a new (better) order.

Nevertheless, this ‘promise and a dream’ of quantified future-making is grounded on a central condition: utopia does not only offer the imaginary of an ideal world, but it is also – and crucially – inherently procedural (cf. Thaler, 2019) as through imagining alternative realities, utopias necessarily encourage a reflection on the current state of the world. This is what Ruth Levitas (2013) coined as ‘utopia as a method’ – one that is not only about imagining better worlds, but also a mode of action. Therefore, the more recent work on utopianism offers a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between utopias and reality. The most important work aimed at merging the two, rather than contradicting them, is Erik Olin Wright’s ‘Real Utopias Project’. As argued by the author (Wright, 2010: 6),

What we need, then, is ‘real utopias’: utopian ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible waystations, utopian designs of institutions that can inform our practical tasks of navigating a world of imperfect conditions for social change.

As we argue in this article, the SDGs, from their inception, represent ‘utopias as method’; by painstakingly drawing a multiplicity of indicators to accompany every goal, they outline these ‘waystations’ for all participant countries as the only available – and realisable – path to a better future. Ruth Levitas (1990) suggests that utopian vision may foster conditions for thought, debate and experimentation; as we will see, the materiality of meetings and data production create spaces for exchange, no matter how unequal and asymmetrical they may be. More than creating conditions for change, the SDGs as a space of interaction help facilitate criticism of the current reality – in the context of global governance, such criticism does not only relate to the state of the world per se, but what has been seen as the continuous colonial project of the global North determining the future of the global South (see Boldero and Francis, 2002).

However, as we will explore in the following section, in order to gain political power and be effective as a mode of political imagination, utopias of quantification have to be coupled with dystopian thinking. Dystopias are inherently grounded in a ‘cautionary pedagogy’ – a warning about the state of the world and its future. As such, dystopias play a specific role in galvanising actors involved in dealing with a crisis (Thaler, 2022). The goal of a dystopia is to imbue utopian visions ‘wishful thinking’ into pragmatic and – in the case of quantification – technocratic modes of inquiry, thus rendering the utopian visions problem- rather than idea-oriented (cf. Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2022). Jameson (2004: 40) could not have phrased this better: utopia-making represents ‘model railroads of the mind’, the continuous ‘bricolating and cobbling together things of all kinds – utopian thinking, as, miniaturization’:

Replicating the great things in handicraft dimensions that you can put together by yourself and test, as with home chemical sets, or change and rebuild in a never-ending variation fed by new ideas and information.

It is this materiality produced by utopian thinking that aligns it so closely with quantification. As we will show in the empirical sections that follow, the SDGs with their focus on country ownership became a space that brought together a broad church of actors. The latter, either through finding this space as a way to channel criticism or through pushing for specific agendas for change, nonetheless found themselves time and again, in smaller or bigger ways, coming together to create perfect versions of the future. By ‘coming together’, we do not intend to say that these processes were harmonious and frictionless. The analysis of several of these spaces (and especially in the agendas around education, poverty and statistical capacity development that we studied) reveals the contrary: these were spaces of struggle and contention, where numbers facilitated debate, but also, at critical junctures of the process, helped to achieve at least a minimum consensus over goals and priorities, so as to allow the journey to the future to continue – even if this future was only to 2030.

The data underpinning this article are part of a larger study of quantification in global governance. We draw on three case studies, examining education, poverty and statistical capacity development, which focus on the debates and construction of indicators for the SDGs. In particular, we draw on 80 semi-structured interviews with key experts in the epistemic communities around the SDG monitoring programme, focusing particular attention on the debates and processes of developing global consensus on principles and standards for statistics, statistical systems and their development, including on the part of IAEG-SDGs, the UN Statistics Division (UNSD), and others. Our interviewees were selected largely using the snowballing method and they consisted of experts that work in the key ‘custodian agencies’ of the SDGs in the fields we investigated: that included experts from the World Bank, United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and some other smaller IOs, including a small number of country experts and civil society actors who were involved in the negotiations around indicators. In their vast majority, they were economists and statisticians and had specific regional and country experience; they therefore worked at multiple levels, both directly with countries themselves, but also at the more transnational level of the meetings. Our fieldwork also included observation of various official meetings, including IAEG-SDGs meetings, the 2020 UN Statistical Commission, and the 2020 World Data Forum. Analysing the central role of quantification in the SDGs also meant the careful analysis of documents, including flagship reports, policy and strategic documents (such as declarations, position papers and action plans), internal documents produced by IOs (including meeting agendas, open consultations and PowerPoint presentations) and research articles published by actors in these networks. The following section will discuss this empirical material, before moving on to the concluding discussion of our analysis.

Infrastructuring a utopian world: The SDGs and the making of quantified futures

Utopia and change: Materiality and the making of quantified futures

By now, there is consensus that many of the SDGs’ targets are unachievable, particularly in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has ‘exposed cracks in social protection systems, health, education and workers’ guarantees and widened inequalities within and across countries worldwide’ (OPHI and UNDP, 2021: 5). Where many of the goals may have been ‘ambitious but possible’ (OPHI and UNDP, 2021: 5) when first introduced in 2015, these utopias are now more distant and the dystopias of widening inequalities and worsening public services worldwide closer at hand. In this context, countries are governed by aspiration through quantification – they are being monitored on their progress towards goals that are understood to be out of reach. This is certainly not new – Brunsson (1989) and others have argued that organisations are often governed by goals that are not achievable. However, what we are seeing in the case of the SDGs are systems of quantification put into place, as if these goals could be achieved and for providing evidence to recalibrate the pathway forward if countries miss the mark on these goals. One member of this global statistical community described this situation as ‘statistical wishful thinking’:

So, I think people will start to look at the end of the [time frame and] realise that we will not be able to reach some of the goals. [Of] course, by definition they are aspirational, and so I mean we need to start thinking beyond 2030. 2030 is here very soon. [As members of the global statistical community, we] are used to thinking [in] very big terms, because our census cycle is 10 years. [. . .] Politicians and also some partners in the private sector and in civil society, they have much shorter time horizons than we have. I mean, very often I ask the question, ‘what you’re proposing sounds good, but is this still going to work in five or 10 years?’ And then I get questions from the other side, ‘well, that’s not my problem’. But I say, ‘well, it’s mine because I need to lay the foundation so that in 2030, the people can have a meaningful assessment whether we achieved the agenda goals or not and why’. (UN Statistician, 3)

It is in the process of validating methods and data sources for monitoring the SDGs where these statisticians may be seen to produce ‘real utopias’ (Wright, 2010). Many of these new policy directions require the production of statistical indicators that can deal with very fuzzy terms, as one representative of the IAEG-SDGs shares here:

Most of the people have been very forthcoming and very patient, but I think there has been frustrations everywhere because things are complicated and because the people who order the system – I think they expected it all to be in place very soon. They had no idea how long [. . .] it takes to develop a new statistical thingy. And all across the system it’s like: ‘yeah, we have some data on forestry, but you have asked us for sustainable forestry, so now we have to figure out what the criteria would be for that, and then we have to figure out is someone measuring that’, and that’s everywhere. (National Statistician, 1, their emphasis)

Taking the example of ‘sustainable tourism’, this IAEG-SDGs representative made clear that there are countless dimensions that sit under these definitions and new modes of measurement, partly because of the generative vagueness of the concept of ‘sustainable’ itself:

it’s difficult to measure tourism in itself. And it’s very difficult to because it looks very different [in different places], and it’s part of several industries that we normally measure. So, it’s part of restaurants, it’s part of hotels, it’s part of things that we would find in the normal national accounts, but then of course this, and ‘what is sustainable tourism’ could mean different things. So, it could mean that you want the water to be enough for all the people that come. It could mean that you don’t want them to destroy the water that comes out from the system. It could mean that you don’t want them [. . .] to fly there and then create a lot of emissions when they’re doing this, or that they go to Amsterdam and destroy the inner city because they are drinking so much beer. (National Statistician, 1)

Perhaps, the most notable function of numbers to create spaces of consensus despite conflict and disagreements in the ‘indicator debate’, has been the quality of numbers to be malleable and moving, rather than fixed, entities. Rather than valuable for their objectivity, collecting data for indicators became a process of finding ‘good enough’ data solutions for the short term: these could be ambiguous numbers, or what interviewees called ‘placeholder’ or ‘provisional’ numbers – and their value rested primarily on their ‘strategic ambiguity’ (Sillince et al., 2012). Such ambiguity of the contested indicators enabled them to act as boundary objects, almost in the original meaning of the term (Star, 2010): that is, it allowed for different interpretations and actions between different groups, without necessarily solving the conflict among them, but facilitating the continuation of the process. For example, the final wording of indicator 1.2.2 on multidimensional poverty was that it would measure ‘the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions’. This final agreed indicator achieved the desired, acceptable consensus by the countries and IOs, not because it actually solved the conflicts over how to best measure multidimensional poverty, but on the contrary, because it did exactly the opposite: it offered a way of avoiding the conflict altogether. In other words, the wording of this indicator was so open, that different actors could then interpret – and thus measure – the indicator differently.

To conclude this section, Berten and Kranke (2022: 155) define anticipatory global governance as the process by which international organisations ‘imagine and establish “present futures” across diverse transnational issue areas’. With anticipatory global governance in the context of the SDGs, these utopian ‘present futures’ are no longer tangible – if they ever were – thus have become ‘creative’ rather than ‘robust’ frameworks for the future, to use Berenskoetter’s (2011) terminology. This is the process of creating new materialities of governing the SDG data infrastructure and the quantified futures it establishes; the production of ‘creative’ statistical frameworks that capture vague political imaginations, while made to still be commensurable and usable in the long-term. Using the examples of creating ‘new statistical thingies’ for sustainable forestry and sustainable tourism above, the work of the global statistical community is framed by these longer time frames that assume that, even if the goals are not achieved by 2030, we need to be able to have measures that can provide ‘meaningful assessments’ about progress towards them and reasons we have missed the mark. This is how numbers and futures mix in one entangled whole: even when targets are unachievable, drawing the goals themselves, specifying the parameters that need to be measured to achieve them, validating and harmonising them across contexts and datasets, are all crucial material underpinnings for expanding and sustaining the SDG infrastructure well into the future.

Utopia-making as compensation: Numbers as stories in a changing governance paradigm

How many of you know what free soloing is? Yes, free soloing is a sports event where you have to climb a vertical rock that may be a thousand metres and you climb it without anyone helping you . . . It’s that simple. It’s not like you aim for gold and get silver. It’s either the gold medal or the death medal . . . Some of these guys plan an assault on a wall and practice it for seven years in a row. That’s all they do for seven years, just plan and practice, plan and practice, and I think the task of monitoring world education is about that ambitious. And you might think I’m joking, like there is no, is death a consequence here of failure? Yes, it is. People die because of lack of education, OK? Not in as direct way as you do if you fall off a mountain, but people die . . . So the consequences of not knowing what we are doing are extreme. (Education consultant, 2015)

The dramatic language of the quotation illustrates the key process through which numbers create utopias – that is, utopia-making consists of the narrative ‘translation’ of the technocratic rationality of numbers into a language of emotion and action. Here, we follow Morgan and Wise (2017) to suggest that narrative ‘coherence-making’ is essential to the fragmented and heterogeneous global governance environment; narratives are the ordering tools through which stories are made. The more dramatic and dystopian the stories, the more the call to action becomes urgent and impossible to refuse. It is through the use of numbers as stories that utopia-making as a project of compensation comes to be; numbers acquire a compensatory role by becoming the tools with which a better future is built.

Hence, this section focuses on the role of narratives to transform numbers into the affective storytelling of emergency, delay and dystopia (even death), but also optimism for a bright future ahead if the goals are realised. Our focus is not on the discursive texts and reports that are produced in global governance settings, but on the narratives of the SDGs that are predominantly shaped beyond words, since most of them are primarily numerical. Thus, narratives should not be examined as separate from number-making; on the contrary, we see numerical data as key in the construction of narratives about the construction of ideal worlds through quantified knowledge. Narratives, through bringing together discursive, numerical and visual elements, become powerful materialities of persuasion and consensus-making, as well as prime tools in fusing numbers, values and futures together.

It is in this function and effects of the SDGs’ numerical narratives that we find a transformational moment in global public policy: this is because, as the previous sections have also clearly shown, it is pertinent to examine the construction of the SDGs, not only as a new measurement agenda comprised metrics and quantitative data, but also – and primarily – as the material construction of a new ‘policy world’: a new space of political processes, interactions and governing paradigms that becomes consolidated through the use of language and numerical inscriptions and is projected well into the future.

Building on decades of UN summitry script writing, the intricate and bottom-up governing architecture of the SDGs took advantage of a tradition already firmly established: that is, it used large and diverse actor gatherings in order to explicitly commit and create goal- and target-setting narratives, as the new blueprint for countries to receive, adjust and follow. For example, in the case of the making of the SDG4, the education goal, two ‘technical groups’ came into existence to validate data and methodologies and ultimately decide on the specific indicators to be used: these were the Technical Cooperation Group and GAML, the ‘Global Alliance for Monitoring Learning’; both groups had a broad membership of technical experts by all relevant IOs, but were also open to civil society and UNESCO member states organisations’ representatives. Thus, what previously would normally have been a small, rather swift and efficient technical team of IO experts and representatives (with their own of course internal conflicts and competitions), it was now opened up to a much larger governing structure that required coordination, continuity, funding, support, meaning and a sense of purpose and unity (Grek, 2022). In this kind of setting, rather than merely focus the discussions on the construction of declarations of shared aspiration, typically associated with UN summitry in the past, number-making took centre stage, however, it was only partially a technical process. Some of our interviewees described these meetings as endless consultation exercises with little progress achieved; others were equally despondent, citing lack of ‘real’ participation and more of a performative function (Grek, 2022). Nonetheless, the participatory function of the process, and the combined function of the technical with the democratic, meant that actors felt important to take part, irrespective of the outcome:

We were of course invited to be part of this, which was a clever move because we had probably been, if not the, at least one of the most critical voices in the room. So we had a dilemma and ended up actually agreeing to be part of this committee . . . I think what we struggle with is the fact that we know that just by being in the room, we are giving an indirect blessing of what the [removed for anonymity purposes] is doing. And at the same time, if we are not in the room, then we have no access to the conversations. We don’t know what’s going on. (Civil society, 1)

The significance of numbers as utopia here is evident: indicators of progress were not merely an additional, technical issue, an add-on to the important work of official declarations; rather, they constituted the bedrock of the new agenda. It is this key operation of goal-setting work that makes the SDGs and their indicators carry an important discontinuity with previous monitoring exercises: the production of indicators, enveloped with the well-known declarative language of progress, represented the new modish agenda, able to travel, translate and adjust to national contexts as the new lingua franca of policy innovation and reform. The Muscat Agreement, signed in 2014 in preparation for constructing the education-related indicators for the SDGs, is an extraordinary example of the power of numbers in policy-making, even in their complete absence:

We support ‘Ensure equitable and inclusive quality education and lifelong learning for all by 2030’ as the overarching goal of the post-2015 education agenda.

We further support the translation of this goal into the following global targets, for which minimum global benchmarks and relevant indicators will be identified/ developed:

Target 1: By 2030, at least x% of girls and boys are ready for primary school through participation in quality early childhood care and education . . . (p3, GEM, 2014)

The list of targets continues with seven targets in total, all of which begin with the time framing of ‘by 2030’. They all set specific targets without, however, specifying numerically what the goal should be: in other words, this is a list of ‘targets’, decontextualised by aspiring them to be applicable globally, yet with no specific numerical inscriptions assigned to them. This practice highlights how numbers act as motors for utopia-making: ‘target-setting’ becomes a narrative-building practice as it creates ‘narrative scaffolding’ for the policy stories to be told – stories of improvement, mobilisation and hope for the future, but also stories of urgency (‘by 2030’) and even dystopia and death, as the quotation at the start showed. What is unique in this case is the fact that this scaffolding is so pervasive that it allows creating narratives of quantified futures, even without including actual numbers – just notional percentages of an imagined world ‘by 2030’. This use of numerical narratives creates a new political imagination, by inserting goal-setting well into the essence of the global governance paradigm as a whole.

Discussion

This article discussed how the SDGs produce quantified utopian futures in three main ways. First, they are at least partly fuelled by idealistic definitions of ‘sustainability’ based on the urgency to address catastrophic climate change, despite the fact that demands for consensus within the United Nations space simultaneously expand the meanings of the concept tremendously. The SDGs have been praised as being exemplary of the ‘transformative utopian impulse’ to build better societies (Basso and Krpan, 2022), while also being critiqued as ‘dreamy’ (Easterly, 2015) or ‘fairy tales’ (Horton, 2014) that would struggle to drive change. The targets set by the 2030 Agenda were ambitious and, indeed, in some cases appear unachievable. Thus, this ‘transformative utopian impulse’ seems to be the engine for the SDGs as a whole. Although ‘sustainability’ in the context of the 2030 Agenda has been a generatively vague concept – allowing for both discourses of neoclassical economists arguing for ‘sustainable economic growth’ and environmental activism – it is undeniable that the utopian desire to avert an environmental dystopia drives the agenda. Thus, the creation of indicators to measure progress towards the SDGs – through deliberation on methods and sources, including a wide range of actors – then becomes the place for creating utopian ‘sustainable’ futures to be measured.

Second, in light of the lessons learned about UN agency-driven global agendas, the statistical work of monitoring the SDGs is explicitly country-driven, as part of a larger ethos of making sure the global agenda is led by local priorities. As we showed, the SDGs have become an ever expansive exercise, precisely because of a governing architecture that links more closely country-level decision-makers and global structures of IOs. Country participation is one of the foundational principles of the SDGs, and the priority to ‘leave no one behind’ explicitly requires all participating actors to be involved. This process of widening participation in decision-making (‘democratisation’) is not only a matter of equity but also a matter of political buy-in into the infrastructure of measurement within the SDGs. Therefore, this SDG moves to render quantification not a purely technocratic exercise but also the main forum of democratic deliberation, has turned the development and validation of indicators into a process of creating a socio-technical imaginary of the common future, one that is utopian – as it is oriented towards the future but is also concerned with realism-driven expectations of feasibility. It is this interplay between idealism and pragmatism that quantification in the SDGs has achieved; trust in numbers here brings the promise of accountability and objectivity together with the political demand to create supposed ‘bottom-up’, collective and ambitious futures for the planet.

Third, using the case of education, we discussed the role of narratives in the construction of dystopian narratives that necessitate radical action and change. We argue that narratives must be understood as a key component of number-making, and are essential for constructing ideal futures. As ‘harm abounds everywhere’ in the current global order (Moylan, 2020), the SDGs address these proliferating wrongs, and establish a global agenda that promotes sustainable development and participatory governance for all of humanity, rather than a limited development agenda focused on ‘basic needs’. The concept of sustainability – as well as its democratisation – is certainly malleable enough to allow for a range of approaches. Such ambiguities have placed the responsibility of actualising ambitious goals on the shoulders of both national and UN statisticians, who had to concretise the utopian SDGs’ goals and targets into measurable indicators.

Although half-way into their 2015–2030 timeframe, the SDGs have not lost their freshness, as they continue to dominate the global political debate around the need to ameliorate the chronic neglect and exploitation of both the environment and of vulnerable populations around the world. The exceptionally hot northern hemisphere’s summer of 2022, and the wildfires and draught it brought with it, are only signals that the global pandemic may not have been the worse humanity will experience in the first half of the 21st century. This article discussed the ways the SDGs represent social and political endeavours not only to rationalise and ‘technicise’ the process of finally shifting course to save the planet and humanity, but also – and perhaps primarily – the ways quantification as utopia became the new mode of political imagination, as the SDGs promised to include and count the voices of all those previously excluded. Thus, the SDGs captured the imagination of a wide set of actors in the field, since they purposefully allowed multiple ‘entry points’ in their world: they emphasised the use of technocratic and management principles to create an objectified and measurable field (see, for example, Kaika, 2017), and thus appear acceptable, accountable and in line with scientific approaches to policy- making, while also proclaiming to be bottom-up, grass-roots and transformative, distinct from older Western-liberal ideas and practices (Waldmüller et al., 2019). Such an open framing of what the SDGs are – or what they could be – allowed them to adapt to contemporary concerns and become more hegemonic than previous monitoring exercises, no doubt partly due to the malleability and flexibility of the monitoring framework itself. Above all, the lack of prescribed indicators at the start of the process, as described earlier, alongside the long, often tumultuous and complex processes to create new ‘statistical thingies’, has allowed the constant insertion of momentum to the process, as actors continue to see it as open and thus worth ‘playing’ for.

As the article showed, building such quantified futures lends itself well to their analysis through a focus on the structures and interlinkages between data, actors and politics. Thus, our article focused analytically on the materiality of data, actors’ political work, and numerical narratives in the making of quantification as utopia. The ‘opening out’ of the SDGS not only to new actors, but also more experimental and even (and often) quite provisional statistical work (for a discussion of ‘imperfect’ numbers, see Bandola-Gill et al., 2022; Grek, 2022) has led to increasing modularity, complexity and even fragmentation, but also a sense of provisionality and inclusion. As Star (1999: 382) says, because ‘nobody is really in charge of the infrastructure’, it lends itself easily to the making of a narrative of a common, collective, utopian future, built on both democratic and inclusive governing ideals, as well as technical know-how, statistical robustness and political accountability.

Nonetheless, we also know by now that counting is a deeply political process, despite its claims to rationality and objectivity (Merry, 2016). Quantification relies on de-politicisation, in order to claim legitimacy and authority; this is the main reason ‘Why International Organisations hate politics’, according to the recent book by Louis and Maertens (2021). Indeed, the sociology of quantification has richly explained the processes of technicisation that social problems often go under, in order for experts to render them technical, and thus factual and neutral, distinct from obstructive political struggles and ideologies (Flinders and Wood, 2014). Similarly, Diane Stone used the term ‘scientisation’ to describe the processes of transforming social issues into problems amenable to the scientific cause-effect relationship that is seen as authoritative enough to control or even reduce uncertainty and risk (Broome et al., 2018; Stone, 2019). Its political dimensions include decisions about what to count and what to ignore, which variables to disaggregate by characteristics such as race and gender, and how much to spend on collecting and analysing information. There are political implications to these decisions, particularly when measuring complicated concepts such as race, access to justice or even gender; the political repercussions are even greater when certain measurement formulas are partly imposed on countries of the Global South and their statistical systems as the global, comparable and thus legitimate ways to collect data and draw policies in these contexts. However, as we showed in this article, quantification as utopia facilitates a re-politicisation of numbers through a nuanced process of creating material spaces of exchange, where numbers and actors interact. The politics of numbers emerges not only behind the veil of technicisation, but also through the process of creating utopias which allow for imagining – and consequently acting towards – a world of promise.

Thus, the SDGs create quantified futures and a common political imagination through two parallel processes: on one hand, ‘infrastructuring’ participatory governance by opening out the process to policy actors; and, on the other hand, commensurating global public policy through the harmonisation of data production and political imagination. Despite power differentials, as well as tensions and disagreements, a common global public policy is created, making quantification the common global policy language in the process. Ultimately, as we have seen, the production of quantified utopian futures, as the only option to avoid catastrophic dystopias, may have little to do with the future itself: rather, it offers productive tools to make sense of and tame an increasingly ungovernable, crisis-prone and fast-moving present.