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Data Practices and Sustainable Development Goals: Organising Knowledge for Sustainable Futures

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Abstract

Knowledge infrastructures produce global objects such as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They solidify how problems are formulated, orient us to possible solutions, and legitimise and support specific actors while excluding others. Knowledge infrastructures are analysed using anthropology of technology, science and technology studies, and development studies, to foster a rich understanding of digital data practices, including issues of accountability and inequality. Five dominant dynamics in the maintenance, reinforcement expansion, and innovation of data infrastructures in relation to the SDGs are analysed. They demonstrate how investments in new approaches are moving away from traditional, state-based, nationwide infrastructures, population surveys, and censuses, and how other types of data are produced and valued. These dynamics are (1) production of data as evidence, (2) disaggregation, (3) localisation, (4) diversification, and (5) meaningful accountability. Across these, we see appeals for disaggregation (moving away from population-level reporting), for localisation (predominantly in the form of geo-location), for diversification of data sources to include big data, and for meaningful accountability rather than auditing. These dynamics show the potential advantages and threats of doing data differently, including de-globalisation or re-localisation of data, reconfiguration of visibility and vulnerability, and accompanying shifts in technologies of accountability.

[I]mproving data is a development agenda in its own right.

—A World that Counts, Report of the UN’s Secretary-General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development 2014

A good indicator of a region’s poverty or underdevelopment is a lack of poverty or development data.

—Letouze (2015)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See networks such as United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy) and USA-Sustainable Cities Initiative (USA-SCI).

  2. 2.

    A notable case, where telephone data in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea was not used to help face the Ebola epidemic in West Africa (McDonald 2016).

  3. 3.

    Edwards (2019) shows what happens to climate knowledge infrastructures when chains of evidence are destabilised through funding cuts, privatisation, fragilising of input, emerging types of review/audit that challenge established modes of expertise.

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Acknowledgements

With thanks to the members of the Data Research Centre and Sabina Leonelli for ongoing conversations on these topics, and to Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn, the editors, and two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments on an earlier draft.

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Beaulieu, A. (2022). Data Practices and Sustainable Development Goals: Organising Knowledge for Sustainable Futures. In: Bruun, M.H., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_18

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