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This special issue explores the workings of global goals as an instrument of global governance by numbers. These goals can alter power relations, affect the distribution of resources, reorganize national and local priorities, create perverse incentives for performance, and produce narratives that shape thinking and communication. As the articles in the 2014 JHDC special issue showed, the MDGs had complex, often distorting, consequences which were often in tension with the (intangible and difficult to quantify) principles of equity, human agency and participation as the cornerstone of development. This issue focuses on SDGs and includes five case studies of this localization process in aid programming in the Valencia, national reporting by Sweden, farming collectives in South Africa, indigenous communities in Australia and New Zealand, and infrastructure development in Ecuador and Pakistan. A sixth paper examines the role of metrics in including Neglected Tropical Diseases in the SDGs. These papers are diverse in the research questions they ask but engage with the common themes of global goals as a tool of global governance and their disruptive effects on power structures. Using the framework of data infrastructure-means of collection and analysis, social structures amongst actors, knowledge systems-this introduction highlights the insights that emerge.

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Private actors are increasingly taking on roles traditionally arrogated to the state. Functions essential to external and internal security and to the satisfaction of basic human needs are routinely contracted out to non-state agents. In the area of privatization of security functions, attention by academics and policy makers tends to focus on the activities of private military and security companies, especially in the context of armed conflicts, and their impact on human rights and post-conflict stability and reconstruction. The first edited volume emerging from New York University School of Law's Institute for International Justice project on private military and security companies, From Mercenaries to Market: The Rise and Regulation of Private Military Companies, looked at the emerging market for force, whereas this second volume looks at the transformations in the nature of state authority. Drawing on insights from work on privatization, regulation, and accountability in the emerging field of global administrative law, this book examines private military and security companies through the wider lens of private actors performing public functions. The central question of this volume is whether there should be any limits on government capacity to outsource traditionally ‘public’ functions. Can and should a government put out to private tender the fulfilment of military, intelligence, and prison services? Can and should it transfer control of utilities essential to life, such as the supply of water? Discussion incorporates numerous perspectives on regulatory and governance issues in the private provision of public functions, but focuses primarily on private actors offering services that impact the fundamental rights of the affected population.

The privatization of public functions thus raises important legal and political issues in the governance of private actors, but also calls into question the nature of what functions should be ‘public’. This concluding chapter draws together findings from the various chapters and outlines the key elements of a governance framework for private military and security functions.