What do we mean when we say "progress towards sustainable development" or "meeting the SDGs"? Behind the concepts and goals is a history and world of data and indicators that set the narrative of what sustainable development means and how we operationalise it.
This presentation draws on the forthcoming Elgar Companion to Data and Indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals, edited by Gaby Umbach and Igor Tkalec with Mira Manini Tiwari. First, it peels back the cover of the 17 SDGs to reveal the quantitative and normative evolutions underpinning our present-day 'governance by goals'. Second, the presenters will dive into their dataset on the political economy, geopolitics, and data quality of sustainable development indices, highlighting the unspoken subjectivities and power dynamics underpinning how civil society and policymakers understand and act towards sustainable development. Third, the editors share insights from the chapters of the volume, focusing on key learnings that are pertinent for all actors working on measurement, policy, or governance of sustainable development.
Professor Gaby Umbach is Part-time Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute where she leads the Global Governance Programme’s research area ‘Knowledge, Governance, Transformations’. At the EUI, she is also Principal of the Interdisciplinary Research Cluster on ‘Expert Knowledge and Authority in Transformative Times’. She is Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, non-resident Visiting Fellow of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS), Adjunct Professor at the Universities of Innsbruck and CIFE/LUISS Guido Carli and Visiting External Examiner at the Department for Public Policy, University of Malta. She is Editorial Board member of the ‘International Journal Evaluation and Program Planning’ and Associate Editor of CUP’s ‘Data & Policy’ and Area Advisor for ‘Policy and Literacy for Data’ of the Data for Policy Community. She is also Academic Advisor and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute for European Politics in Berlin and involved in the EU’s ESPAS Futurium Expert Group on Horizon Scanning. Her research focuses on the interaction between knowledge, evidence, data, and governance. She analyses how governance by and of knowledge influence transformations of politics and policies. This includes the analysis of measuring and the use of statistics as governance technique; data-based governance; data and evidence literacy in policy-making; evidence-informed policy-making; multilevel and anticipatory governance: socio-economic as well as eco-social policies: and sustainable development.
Igor Tkalec is Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in social data science at UCL's Social Data Institute (SODA) with a background in political economy. Prior to joining UCL, Igor was a Research Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence working on the GlobalStat project. Igor holds BA (University of Zagreb) and MA (Central European University) degrees in political science, PhD (University of Luxembourg) in political science as well as MSc in computer science with data science (University of Wolverhampton).
Mira Tiwari is a Research Associate in Knowledge, Governance, Transformations (KGT), part of the Global Governance Programme at the European University Institute's Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. At KGT her projects centre on optimising the nexus between science, policymakers, and citizens, bridging disciplines and knowledges for accurate, ethical data and evidence-informed policy making. She specialises in societal learning and education for sustainable development, and climate and social justice in Majority World contexts. She has practitioner and academic experience in interdisciplinary research and policy, inter-institutional governance, regional cooperation, and education. Her work aims at strengthening systems approaches and transformative governance based on critical data use, local and expert knowledges, and socioecological and decolonial systems.
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