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This special issue explores the workings of global goals as an instrument of global governance by numbers. These goals can alter power relations, affect the distribution of resources, reorganize national and local priorities, create perverse incentives for performance, and produce narratives that shape thinking and communication. As the articles in the 2014 JHDC special issue showed, the MDGs had complex, often distorting, consequences which were often in tension with the (intangible and difficult to quantify) principles of equity, human agency and participation as the cornerstone of development. This issue focuses on SDGs and includes five case studies of this localization process in aid programming in the Valencia, national reporting by Sweden, farming collectives in South Africa, indigenous communities in Australia and New Zealand, and infrastructure development in Ecuador and Pakistan. A sixth paper examines the role of metrics in including Neglected Tropical Diseases in the SDGs. These papers are diverse in the research questions they ask but engage with the common themes of global goals as a tool of global governance and their disruptive effects on power structures. Using the framework of data infrastructure—means of collection and analysis, social structures amongst actors, knowledge systems—this introduction highlights the insights that emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do global development goals translate into local action? How do such goals support or undermine already existing efforts, at the local level, to build robust and sustainable communities? In this article we examine the experience of a women's cooperative vegetable farm in rural South Africa, considering the on-the-ground consequences of high-level planning for development and, in particular, the measurement and accountability demands associated with such initiatives. We focus on the broad aims of Sustainable Development Goals 2 (to end hunger) and 5 (to achieve gender equality and women's empowerment). We explore farmers' responses to external demands for measurement and accountability, some of which they are not well equipped to meet and others of which collide with their own priorities to support their households and wider community. We find a major problem of translation between global goals and the needs of people on the ground: far from resulting in material support for small-scale farmers, the daily burdens of the 'audit society' directly impede aims like ending hunger and achieving gender equality. The first section of the paper briefly canvasses recent efforts at global goal setting, considering the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and SDGs in turn. The longer second section offers the case study of the women's farm, examining how the measurement demands related to global goals impact locally generated priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global development goals have become increasingly used by the UN and the international community to promote priority objectives. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are the most prominent example of such goals but many others have been set since the 1960s. Despite their prominence and proliferation, little has been written about the concept of global goals as a policy tool, their effectiveness, limitations and broader consequences. This paper explores global development goals as a policy tool, and the mechanisms that have two types of effects: governance effects and knowledge effects. These effects lead to both intended and unintended consequences in influencing international development strategies and action. The paper analyses the MDGs as an example to argue that global goals activate the power of numbers to create incentives for national governments and others to mobilize for important objectives. But the powers of simplification, reification and abstraction lead to broader unintended consequences when the goals are misinterpreted as national planning targets and strategic agendas, and when they enter the language of development to redefine concepts such as development and poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins by providing some context for the selection of targets and indicators chosen to measure Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5, “improvement in maternal health,” considering why the broad vision of sexual and reproductive health and (reproductive) rights set out at international conferences in the 1990s was reduced to maternal health in the MDGs in 2001. We consider the intended and unintended consequences to the sexual and reproductive health and rights agenda based on the choices made with respect to the selection of the targets and indicators under MDG 5, and their conversion into national planning tools. Finally, we set out criteria for the selection of goals, targets, and indicators, which we believe should be applied to the post-2015 global development agenda-setting process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]