Objectivity as Distance or Engagement: The Riddle of SDG Measurement
| Author | Pali Lehohla |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12628 |
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
Objectivity as Distance or Engagement: The
Riddle of SDG Measurement
Pali Lehohla
Pan African Institute for Evidence, Pretoria, South Africa
Abstract
What is objectivity in SDG measurement? This commentary explores the complexity of objectivity in measurement when the
problems are ‘global’yet manifest themselves with local specificities. This special issue helps elicit gaps in knowledge, tools
and contexts in SDG measurement. But in doing so through the lens of political economy, ‘sets the cat among the pigeons’.
The key question they raise is the sanitization of measurement and its sanctification to the status of objectivity without realiz-
ing that the process is fraught with contexts that make self- interest and conflict of interest an endemic risk.
The advent of global approaches to what is seen as global
problems has raised questions of the relevance and appro-
priateness of local specificities. How the two contexts are
woven in a meaningful way is nothing short of extensive
discursive discussion involving significant compromises and
continuous delegations of responsibilities upwards, down-
wards and sideways to expert advice. In the course of the
glacial shifts in the discourse, content and contexts are
diluted; methodological lenses provide faint images and
demands to conclude add significant pressure. Never have
statisticians felt the pressure at the high table of global
agenda more than with the advent of the Millennium Devel-
opment Goals (MDGs) initially, and subsequently the Sus-
tainable Development Goals (SDGs) when the oven of the
measurement discourse reached melting point. Sakiko
Fukuda-Parr and Desmond McNeill have in this special issue
been seized with the pathways through which we arrive at
the truth and objectivity of measurement.
The United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC) was
established in 1947, and in 2017 it celebrated seventy years.
At this point in time, the UNSC reflected on progress of sta-
tistical measurement. Three main reasons for celebration
were apparent. First it was the accession to the Fundamen-
tal Principles for Official Statistics by the United Nations
General Assembly at its sitting in 2014, 20 years after these
were introduced into the United Nations statistics system in
1994. Second it was the adoption of the SDG indicators by
ECOSOC in June 2017 and these were then acceded to by
the UN General Assembly in July 2017; and third it was
being 70-years-old and at that being one of the three or so
oldest commissions notably sitting side by side with the
Human Rights Commission.
The establishment of the UNSC was to achieve universal
standards for measurement with the aim of ensuring macro-
economic stability in countries and globally and thus mini-
mize the exigencies of war, the cause of which was driven
by the seismic macroeconomic instability. That statisticians
could be called upon to hold world peace is significant in
its own right. The first responsibility at that was the creation
and methodological advancements in the compilation of
growth statistics, the national accounts and price statistics,
the consumer and producer price indices. The censuses of
populations and the decennial agenda followed very soon
driven by the global decolonization movement and the
demand for establishment of post-colonial states, particularly
in Latin America, Asia and Africa.
More responsibilities came on board with the Rio Declara-
tion on Environment. And by 1995, there was Cairo on Pop-
ulation Development and Beijing focusing specifically on
gender, women and reproductive rights. This crucial evolu-
tion and discovery of fundamentals underpinning human
endeavor drove the demand for measurement. The paradox
of it all is both the oldest commissions of the United
Nations, namely the United Nations Statistics Commission
and the United Nations Human Rights Commission were not
bed fellows for over 60 years and ‘when the two commis-
sions intersected through the lens of the human develop-
ment index, alas they were distances apart’–they indeed
became the strangest of bedfellows and the 2003 UNSC has
a telling record of how the UNDP Human Development
Report was dressed down. The advent driven through Part-
ners for Development of Statistics in the 21st Century
(PARIS21) of measurement of governance received a hostile
audience at the UNSC in 2005.
The MDGs were equally received with skepticism by the
statistical community. Correctly so, as the measurement disci-
pline had not evolved to the level that the so called objectiv-
ity of time series could be guaranteed for most of the
indicators. From the onset the MDGs were an imposition and
statisticians had first to negotiate their way to manage this
significantly unfunded mandate, second the politics especially
of Goal 8 that discussed obligations of the north to the south
in as far as financing development brought serious political
chasms in the hitherto ‘orderly agenda’of the UNSC. Twice,
©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:Suppl.1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12628
Global Policy Volume 10 . Supplement 1 . January 2019
144
Practitioner Commentary
To continue reading
Request your trial