The papers in this special issue provide accounts of the politics and knowledge that shaped the Sustainable DevelopmentGoals SDGs The open and transparent processes in the Open Working Group OWG and Post 2015 agenda consultationschallenged the MDG paradigm and set more transformative and ambitious goals But across many goals there was slippagein ambition when targets and indicators were selected In some cases this is due to genuine difficulty in defining a suitableindicator In other cases there is clearly a contestation about the agenda and indicators are used to reorient or pervert themeaning of the goal The accounts of the negotiations concerning inequality sustainable agriculture access to justice educa tion environment show how the selection of an indicator is purportedly a technical matter but is highly political thoughobscured behind the veil of an objective and technical choice The papers also highlight how the increasing role of big dataand other non traditional sources of data is altering data production dissemination and use and fundamentally altering theepistemology of information and knowledge This raises questions about data for whom and for what fundamental issuesconcerning the power of data to shape knowledge the democratic governance of SDG indicators and of knowledge for devel opment overall

Knowledge and Politics in Setting and Measuring the SDGs PDF

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