Introduction—Data, Knowledge, Politics and Localizing the SDGs

This special issue explores the workings of global goals as an instrument of global governance by numbers. These goals can alter power relations, affect the distribution of resources, reorganize national and local priorities, create perverse incentives for performance, and produce narratives that shape thinking and communication. As the articles in the 2014 JHDC special issue showed, the MDGs had complex, often distorting, consequences which were often in tension with the (intangible and difficult to quantify) principles of equity, human agency and participation as the cornerstone of development. This issue focuses on SDGs and includes five case studies of this localization process in aid programming in the Valencia, national reporting by Sweden, farming collectives in South Africa, indigenous communities in Australia and New Zealand, and infrastructure development in Ecuador and Pakistan. A sixth paper examines the role of metrics in including Neglected Tropical Diseases in the SDGs. These papers are diverse in the research questions they ask but engage with the common themes of global goals as a tool of global governance and their disruptive effects on power structures. Using the framework of data infrastructure—means of collection and analysis, social structures amongst actors, knowledge systems—this introduction highlights the insights that emerge.