How to Analyze IO Quantification and Statistics Using an Adapted Methodology: the Case of UNESCO

In our research, we implement and adapt to IOs, and to international and transnational contexts more generally, the quantification-based approach initiated and developed mostly by Alain Desrosières (2008) as well as its related methodology.For the 2020 Conference, we propose the following: we will begin by introducing the quantification field, its methodology, and the specificities of applying it to IOs (Cussó & Piguet, in preparation); we will develop, secondly, their application and “utility” in the analysis of a specific case as an illustration; that of the restructuring of the statistical services of UNESCO in the 1990s (Cussó, 2006). We will follow the “process” of quantification (analyzing its goals, actors, stages, technical choices, cooperation procedures, data publication…) to better understand the political dimension of both features and uses of international statistics. In analyzing what’s at stake (and for who) in the restructuring, we will focus on the evolution of the international program on education statistics of 1945-1990 (linking technical decisions to the “Right to education”) to a new statistical configuration (emerging actors, new methods and data collected and their link with the new political goals of “Education for all”). The focus on this evolution underlies a better understanding both of the inextricable process intertwining technique, power and social factors and of IO functioning and specificities. This specific case will show that Quantification study, a developing domain, allows for important methodological and theoretical advances in the field of IO studies.