Seeing Through Numbers: Knowledge Controversies and the Interconnectedness of International Organisations

The production of global metrics by International Organisations (IOs) has not only penetrated the transnational social and policy fields; it has also become an integral mode of the ways in which IOs interconnect. Yet, the interconnectedness stemming from the rise of quantification in the IOs as well as the implications of these new institutional alignments remain consistently theoretically and empirically underexplored. This paper starts to address this gap by proposing a theorisation of numbers in global governance as issue framing devices. The starting point of the empirical exploration and a theoretical argument put forward in this paper is a two-fold observation. Firstly, numbers carry particular meanings and ignite ‘relations of visibility’ (Espeland & Lom, 2015) of different aspects of policy problems. Secondly, the increasingly interconnected field of global governance necessarily creates institutionalised pressures towards unification of approaches to measurement and monitoring across IOs. These two qualities of global quantification processes might inevitably lead to conflicts over the perceivably ‘correct’ ways of measuring social problems. This paper presents an in-depth qualitative exploration (employing interviews and document analysis) of such contest in a debate over childhood poverty indicators between the UNICEF and the World Bank. The paper mobilises the concept of a ‘knowledge controversy’ to explore ways in which contradictory sets of institutionalised frames of policy problems and - conversely - approaches to their measurement, clash in this setting. Knowledge controversies are emblematic of the increasing interconnectedness of the IOs and the move towards ‘frame convergence’ across the organisations. Through these interlinked inquiries, the paper contributes to the existing debates over the ‘politics of numbers’ by exploring numbers’ discursive power to enable both a contest and consensus across IOs.