Transforming the ‘Social’: Indicators and Algorithms in Global Social Policy

At the same time that social policy spreads globally, visible, among others, in the success story of ‘social cash transfers’ as a policy model across the global South, new ways of doing politics have been devised in international organizations that build on indicators and algorithms. While especially indicators have been criticized for their inherent reductionism and narrowing of social concerns, the productive capacities of algorithms and indicators tend to be neglected which could still elevate rights-based discourses. The paper presents a theoretical perspective towards numerical technologies that combines insights from STS, the historical epistemology of research practices and the social studies of accounting, in an empirical application to the field of global social protection policies since the 1990s, surveying indicator- and algorithm-based politics by international organizations. It argues that indicators and algorithm-based politics are not just technocratic means of control, but adds how these devices simultaneously open up spaces for reform, extend social concerns by continuous observation of global social problems and disseminate rights-based institutions. However, this goes hand in hand with a transformation of forms of accountability and the status of norms and values in (global social) policy-making that may fundamentally alter the normative underpinnings of global social policy.