LIST OF PANELS

The governance of global challenges is rapidly changing.  ‘Super-wicked’ problems (Levin et al., 2012), diverse actors and overlapping agendas have led to increasing complexity and uncertainty about responses to global crises. Despite the multiplicity of actors, crises and fields of action, public policy has known one constant: quantification has always been the primary motivation behind the governance of the transnational but has received renewed momentum in the face of a world blighted by the multiple compounding crises of COVID-19, climate change, migration, poverty and extremism. This prominence of numbers as technologies of government (Rose, 1991) in public policy is enacted not only in their expansion into new spaces but also in the types of political effects they achieve. As they frame issues, link policy instruments and connect diverse actors, the making of numerical data (in whatever forms they may take) emerges, in fact, as the central venue for ‘policy work’ (Colebatch, 2006); as such, their production is of high significance to policy studies.

Scholarship on the role of numbers in governing societies has been abundant and has attracted multiple fields of study, including sociology, political science, geography, anthropology, STS, and others. Prominent authors have written lucidly about the role of numbers in the making of modern states and the governing role of measurement regimes in various areas of public policy and social life (Porter 1995; Power 1997; Desrosiéres 1998; Espeland and Stevens 2008). Similarly, anthropologies of numbers suggest that ‘our lives are increasingly governed by – and through – numbers, indicators, algorithms and audits and the ever-present concerns with the management of risk’ (Shore and Wright 2015: 23). Further, important insights and perspectives on indicators in particular come from STS (Bowker & Star 2000; Lampland, 2010), including actor-network theory (Latour, 1987).

Drawing on these multiple literatures and disciplines, this panel will explore various dimensions of the rise of metrics in global public policy and governance. In particular, it will aim to identify and propose new empirical and theoretical approaches to studying quantification as the ‘epistemic infrastructure’ that holds and steers the governance of public policy fields transnationally. The empirical investigation of the production and effects of indicators, models and targets as ‘epistemic infrastructures’ is particularly useful for capturing the emergence and consequences of the ways in which quantification has scaled-up, linking different sites of calculation and governance.

Bibliography:

Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (2000). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. MIT press.

Colebatch, H. K. (2006). What work makes policy?. Policy sciences, 39(4), 309-321.

Desrosières, A. (1998). The politics of large numbers: A history of statistical reasoning. Harvard University Press.

Espeland, W. N., & Stevens, M. L. (2008). A sociology of quantification. European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 49(3), 401-436.

Lampland, M. (2010). False numbers as formalizing practices. Social Studies of Science, 40(3), 377-404.

Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard university press

Levin, K., Cashore, B., Bernstein, S., & Auld, G. (2012). Overcoming the tragedy of super wicked problems: constraining our future selves to ameliorate global climate change. Policy sciences, 45(2), 123-152.

Power, M. (1997). The audit society: Rituals of verification. OUP Oxford.

Rose, N. (1991). Governing by numbers: Figuring out democracy. Accounting, organizations and society, 16(7), 673-692.

We invite papers researching quantification and the role of numbers in governing global challenges from multiple perspectives including public policy, governance, International Relations, STS and political sociology and anthropology.

We particularly encourage investigation of the following questions:

1.      How is ‘governing by numbers’ evolving in the face of new global challenges (such as the rise of populism, COVID-19 crisis or climate change)?

2.      What types of political and institutional effects are achieved by quantification?

3.      How does quantification differ across settings (types of organisations, policy fields, levels of government, evolution over time etc.)?

4.      How are numbers evaluated and assessed? What is the role of accuracy, credibility and usability of numbers?

5.      What is the role of visualisations and political communication of data and numbers?

6.      How does quantification impact on knowledge production and expertise in policy domains? What new forms of expertise can we identify in this area?

7.      What types of connections and structures emerge as a result of quantification?

8.      What types of ‘epistemic infrastructures’ can we identify in this area? What material and symbolic aspects of the infrastructures of measurement are particularly relevant to understanding the rise of quantification?

We are looking for contributions to these and other questions relating to the study of quantification in global public policy and transnational governance. We encourage submissions using different methodological approaches, including qualitative and ethnographic methods, quantitative methods and visual methods.