Layers of Politics and Power Struggles in the SDG Indicators Process
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12630 |
| Author | Serge Kapto |
Layers of Politics and Power Struggles in the
SDG Indicators Process
Serge Kapto
UNDP, New York
Abstract
The process of designing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was intensely political, as it can be expected of Uni-
ted Nations negotiations of that magnitude. Inevitably, those politics have spilled over into the technical process of formulat-
ing global indicators to monitor the Sustainable Development Goals. This commentary explores some of the tensions between
competing priorities and various constituencies that affect the design of the global SDG indicator framework.
As the articles in this special issue point out, the selection
of indicators for monitoring progress on the implementa-
tion of the 2030 Agenda does not depend purely on
technical considerations but is inherently about political
questions of competing priorities between various stake-
holders. The SDG indicator process itself has been beset
with power struggles.
Let’s get out of here
It was 7:35 pm on Sunday 2 August 2015 in the hallowed
halls of the United Nations General Assembly, the final
moments of a marathon negotiations session that was sup-
posed to have ended 48 hours before. An errant open
microphone captured that sigh from a senior diplomat as
he banged the gavel to mark the end of the negotiations
on the Post-2015 development agenda, and the room
erupted in cheers. Those five words reflected the relief of
diplomats who had deployed the finest of their skills to
steer through taxing, intense and extensive negotiations
spanning several years, to achieve a fragile consensus
between a myriad of competing policy priorities, political
posturing, and opposing stakeholders. The 2030 Agenda for
Sustainable Development would be adopted by Heads of
States a few weeks later, hailed as a pinnacle of multilateral-
ism, and an innovative exercise in crowd sourcing policy-
making on a planetary scale. With 17 goals and 169 targets,
it had things that everybody could be happy about. But it
also had things that everybody could be unhappy about. As
the Post-2015 negotiation process was nearing its end, and
the window for influencing the choice of goals and targets
was closing, many stakeholders quickly turned their atten-
tion to the still undecided part of the new global develop-
ment agenda, the indicator framework to monitor its
implementation.
In June 2015, the UN Statistical Commission convened the
first meeting of the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG
Indicators, a carefully selected group of member states
mandated with developing an indicator framework for the
newly adopted 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,
its 17 Goals and 169 targets.
Statisticians meet politicians
Held in the halls of the United Nations Headquarters in New
York, the first meeting of the IAEG-SDGs was attended by
chief statisticians representing its members, some escorted
by representatives from their Permanent Missions to the UN,
as well as UN Agencies and (a few) civil society representa-
tives. It was perhaps intended to be a celebratory beginning
of a technical process to develop sound and objective met-
rics to track progress towards achievement of the 2030
Agenda. But from the beginning, sparks flew, and the meet-
ing descended into a shouting match, chaotic at times,
between technically minded statisticians eager to get
started and politically minded diplomats just emerging from
a bruising though ultimately successful negotiation of the
2030 Agenda. Since then, the IAEG-SDGs, which met for the
8th time in November 2018, has carefully avoided meeting
in New York. It is fair to say that consequently, the IAEG-
SDGs has been driven more by technocratic and financial
considerations, and has struggled to fully grasp the overar-
ching political ambition of the 2030 Agenda, notably when
it comes to the ‘Leave No One Behind’principle and inter-
linkages between SDGs.
Statisticians meet UN bureaucrats
Even before that fateful first meeting, the IAEG-SDGs had
already been confronted with the very political question of
who calls the shots on the SDG indicators. United Nations
agencies had led the technical process of developing the
MDG indicators, arguably an unreserved success in establish-
ing the importance of statistics in development. They
expected to play a similar role for the SDGs. Instead, they
found themselves relegated to the status of observers,
©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:Suppl.1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12630
Global Policy Volume 10 . Supplement 1 . January 2019
134
Practitioner Commentary
To continue reading
Request your trial