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Many contemporary efforts to govern global challenges are driven by combinations of numbers and futures. This special section proposes the novel concept of 'quantified futures' as a way of grasping this widespread entanglement. Because existing scholarship has largely treated quantification and futurisation as discrete governing technologies, their intersections have remained undertheorised and underexplored. In this introductory article, we discuss similarities between quantification and futurisation to build an integrated analytical framework that outlines how quantified futures operate across transnational policy domains by shaping the salience, scope and urgency of global challenges and their solutions. The special section at large cautions against overly optimistic expectations regarding the capacity of quantified futures to tackle global challenges. Rather, it underscores the need to enquire into the mutually reinforcing effects between, on the one hand, the growing use of quantified futures and, on the other hand, the increase and diversification of global challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Covid crisis, while countries set up an unprecedented social protection response, international organisations quickly turned towards envisioning how to 'build back better' using social protection. Building on a qualitative document analysis, the article finds that international organisations frequently imagine the future through anticipations of protracted and multidimensional crises – often in quantified form. Arguing that futures are an ideational influence on policymaking, the article reconstructs two ways in which these crisis anticipations inform international organisations' social protection policy proposals: first, as legitimising narratives for expanding social protection; second, in the form of policy proposals that embed crisis anticipation in their design, as in the case of 'adaptive social protection'. The article shows that adaptive social protection departs from traditional social protection policy: it promotes strengthening individual, household and systemic resilience, and implementing preparedness as a governing rationale, thus moving from a focus on compensation and provision towards prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction sets the scene for the five papers of the special issue on 'Reflexivity in Global Social Policy'. It argues that a reflexivity lens can deepen a self-critical assessment of the field and its boundaries, and contribute to more conceptual and analytical nuance. The introduction reviews existing approaches that reflect on the key building blocks of the field – ideas, terminology, and theory – and makes a case for addressing the porous boundaries between scholarship and practice. It subsequently suggests the two notions of perspectivity and performativity to inform further reflexive analyses, before introducing the five papers and five forum contributions that constitute this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the production of decent work indicators within the ILO, to demonstrate that developing measurement infrastructures in global policymaking requires political work. The concept of decent work responds to the perceived marginalization of the ILO in social and labor policy and was supposed to provide a new unifying normative framework for the organization. The article shows that creating decent work indicators encountered challenges due to its highly politicized production process. Proponents of quantification (mostly workers' representatives) and opponents (mostly employers' representatives) disagreed about the function of indicators: should they be country-specific or allow for universal assessment of progress from above. In effect, although indicators of decent work have been integrated into the Sustainable Development Goals--mostly as part of goal no. 8, many are still incomplete. As a result, the indicators did not establish a "framework of assessment," which would have been guided by universal standards of progress allowing the ILO to "govern at a distance," and could not initiate a paradigmatic policy shift, impeding the infrastructuralization of measurement. Theoretically, the article advances our understanding of policy formulation and design on the transnational level by showing the political foundation of knowledge-based instruments. Empirically, it rests on a Grounded Theory-based analysis of key ILO documents, including Governing Body minutes, conference and expert meeting reports, and official publications, mainly from the period from 1998 to 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The welfare state is increasingly challenged and threatened by futures, whose exact realisation remains largely uncertain. The article compares how the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank anticipate and authorise "futures of work" in light of technological transformations and climate change. The article shows that IOs face epistemic constraints both in constructing problems and in designing social security policy proposals. Constraints rely on visions of possible and probable futures over which the IOs do not always have control. Anticipatory practices that enact future visions oscillate between concretely specifying future developments and narrative flexibility, which does not directly specify courses of action but impacts core logics behind policy proposals. Irrespective of IOs' ideological differences, solutions to technological transformations focus on precaution, whereas solutions to climate change focus on preparation. While precaution allows for imagining possibilities, preparation stresses the urgency of issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue introduction develops the concept of anticipatory global governance by focusing on the practices through which international organisations (IOs) imagine and establish "present futures" across diverse transnational issue areas. Rather than following a conventional chronological stance, the contributors adopt a constructivist perspective on time to detail the logics and effects of anticipatory practices. In this introductory article, we suggest that the analysis of IOs' anticipatory practices and the resulting present futures can broaden our understanding of global governance in two ways. First, we highlight the implications of how IOs problematise and govern yet-uncertain future transnational issues. Second, we reveal how in this process IOs perform, rather than simply wield, authority by sanctioning a wide range of visions. The special issue develops a general conceptual vocabulary for the study of anticipatory global governance, and provides empirical evidence on how IOs govern by anticipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the socio-economic and cultural diversity of the world, it is a bold undertaking by international organisations to propose welfare policies designed to apply to all or many countries. We argue that since the 1990s, new instruments of quantification have extended the knowledge base of international organisations, helping them to design and communicate policy proposals with a global scope. We map these numerical instruments in the field of basic income protection, showing that they serve to identify global social problems and to design global models of welfare. Three case studies illustrate the findings. To make sense of the spread of quantification, we draw on world society theory, arguing that the numerical instruments create a global space of observation, comparison and deliberation regarding social reform. We conclude that numerical instruments have facilitated the expansion of global social protection since the 1990s, but have also narrowed social concerns in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]