Power, Politics and Knowledge Claims: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in the SDG Era
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12598 |
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
Power, Politics and Knowledge Claims: Sexual
and Reproductive Health and Rights in the
SDG Era
Alicia Ely Yamin
Harvard University
Abstract
The selection of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) , targets and indicators for sexual and reproductive health and rights
(SRHR) can only be understood in the light of struggles to advance these rights amid a context of the growing reliance on
indicators to measure progress. If the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) de-politicized inherently polemical issues in
SRHR, the (re)production of knowledge of rights in the SDGs poses a subtler, but just as serious, threat. Although rights, and
SRHR in particular, are apparently taken into account, the apparent neutrality of these metrics obscures politics and ideology.
There is a danger that over-reliance on quantitative indicators obscures the structural challenges facing the advancement of
SRHR, and therefore indicators should be coupled with qualitative information derived in context.
In a 2012 article, I argued that, given the knowledge and
governance functions of indicators in global development,
we should be ‘counting what we know and knowing what
to count’(Yamin and Falb, 2012). While maternal mortality is
notoriously difficult to measure for statistical and practical
reasons, measuring the enjoyment of SRHR entails an array
of conceptual, philosophical and normative complexities.
That article concluded:
In selecting a few numerical indicators, and in high-
lighting one –the Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) –
the MDGs process largely attempted to erase those
complexities. In the course of the MDGs, the narra-
tive of progress became driven by an extreme
focus on measurement of that one numerical indi-
cator; questions regarding the root causes of
maternal mortality, let alone gender inequality and
obstacles to promoting a broader SRHR were lost
in the process. (Yamin and Falb, 2012, p. 370)
In many ways these and other human rights and gender
justice concerns regarding what was missing in the Millen-
nium Development Goals (MDGs) were addressed in the
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as a result of enor-
mous political mobilization and strategic advocacy. However,
in this article, I argue that if the MDGs de-politicized inher-
ently polemical issues in SRHR, the (re)production of knowl-
edge of rights in the SDGs poses a subtler, but just as
serious, threat. Although rights, and SRHR in particular, are
apparently taken into account, there is a danger that mea-
surement based on abstracted data systematically obscures
structural obstacles to achieving those rights, and displaces
the political energy needed to combat injustice. I suggest
complementing such quantified measures with contextual,
qualitative information.
I begin by providing some context for the use of indica-
tors to measure aspects of SRHR, focusing on indicators
related to emergency obstetric care. In the next section, I
examine the struggles toward the end of the MDGs, both
from within the United Nations and from civil society, to
expand the understanding of SRHR in the next development
agenda, which achieved important advances, sometimes in
alignment and sometimes independent of the G77.
In the third section, I set out the indicators selected to
measure the SRHR targets under Goal 5 ‘Gender Equality’:
and especially those used to measure laws and regulations
relating to SRHR. I also note that the selection of indicators
for the SDGs was part of a global turn toward the use of
indicators to crystallize measures of progress in SRHR, which
reflected a shift toward a notion of accountability as moni-
toring data points rather than structures to remedy and
transform social problems.
In the fourth section, I discuss the dangers inherent in
measuring progress in rights through these metrics that are
abstracted from social context and may well obscure more
than they reveal about the power dynamics at play. I argue
that there is a real danger that the form of measurement
masquerades as progress while systematically obscuring the
ways in which women and others are deprived of SRHR. I
conclude that while global indicators are potentially critical
tools to measure dimensions of SRHR, they should be used
to indicate where contextual and generally qualitative infor-
mation is necessary to understand a given situation.
©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:Suppl.1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12598
Global Policy Volume 10 . Supplement 1 . January 2019
52
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