A good indicator of a region's poverty or underdevelopment is a lack of poverty or development data.- Letouze (2015) In May of 2019, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) published a Global Assessment Report, which stated that one million species are at risk of extinction in the coming years (IPBES 2019). One of the prominent reactions to the report on the part of policy-makers, researchers, and other stakeholders, was to question how the IPBES could possibly know this. Other global assessments, whether about the state of ecosystems, energy reserves, climate change or GDP measures, and level of development, have also been the object of debate about whether we can act on the basis of these technical reports. Strikingly, the global scale and urgency in these debates is increasingly articulated around the knowledge