The poverty of numbers: reflections on the legitimacy of global development indicators

Abstract

It is no surprise that development institutions and actors have taken to indicators with such enthusiasm. Where indicators are both a form of knowledge production and simultaneously a technology of governance, they are a form of soft powers that allow such actors to set the standards for what it is to be developed in the twenty-first century. Such measures of civilisation have been dominant throughout a history of Global North–South encounters: measurement was central to the many forms of colonial control, from map-making to craniometry, to the global ‘discovery’ of poverty in the 1940s. This paper seeks to place development indicators in this colonial context by focusing on the issue of comparability or the global claim that underpins global development indicators.

Framing in and through International Law

“…Starting from the 1990s, there has been a global trend in the use of indicators as a governance technique. 106 Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), private firms, and even states (mainly the United States) have begun to regularly package and distribute information on the relative performance of states, ranging from the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index, to the Financial Action Task Force Blacklist, the Sustainable Development Goals, to the Transparency Perception Index by Transparency International. Such GPIs are ever more analyzed by PIL and international relations scholars 107 given that they are powerful governance tools for shaping the behavior of states and framing issues in the national as well as the international realm.…”

Indicators, security and sovereignty during COVID-19 in the Global South

“…In focusing on the Global South, we do well to take account of the 'globality critique' raised in this context by Morag Goodwin (2017). Attention must be paid to the specific cultural and political contexts within which particular indicators see action.…”

Differentiating and connecting indicators: the quality and performance of law in the World Bank's Doing Business Project

“…The International Monetary Fund (IMF) uses the TLIs to assess creditworthiness and to design economic crisis-management policies that involve legal reforms (Nelson, 2014). Aside from these direct effects, TLIs also exercise a more indirect and ‘soft power’ over nations (Goodwin, 2017). They set the global norms for legal systems (Davis et al ., 2012a; 2012b) and assess compliance with the legal ‘best practices’ determined by IOs (Hafner-Burton, 2008).…”

“…Moreover, they are biased against countries with a French civil-law tradition over countries with a British common-law tradition for they usually have a more detailed, complicated and expansive corpus of law (Khartchenko-Dorbec et al ., 2006). This is also a symptom of their ‘universalistic’, ‘one-size-fits-all’ attitude towards law that ignores the particular characteristics of societies (Goodwin, 2017).…”