The Seductions of Quantification Rebuffed? The Curious Failure by the CESCR to Engage Water and Sanitation Data
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Some years ago, scholars noticed that the human rights field was turning towards metrics and quantification, seeking tools that might move the rights endeavor beyond its reliance on stories of suffering and towards the production of knowledge inflected by science. Chief among the tools practitioners began to embrace were human rights indicators, here defined as metrics calibrated to make empirical measurements related to specific norms. Rights indicators were said to be useful in understanding the scope, dynamics and relationships among human rights violations through population-based, quantitative and systematic qualitative monitoring methods. Indicators were also seen to allow advocates to access and deploy the political and cultural force of numbers in a world where what is measured is what counts. They also presented the possibility of building human rights concerns into the very fabric of development, humanitarian practice and even security measures undertaken by states, inter-governmental organisations and other powerful actors. As Sally Merry explained in 2011, indicators were seen as ‘objective’, capable of ‘set[ting] clearer standards for compliance with a convention’ and more concrete goals for advocates. As Rosga and I explained in 2009, ‘the turn toward mechanics of measurement and notions of scientific objectivity may appear to offer a kind of authority that [human rights] bodies have never been able to achieve’ in the eyes of mistrusting governments. While this embrace of quantification was celebrated as an advance by many, critics—with Merry prominent among them—also registered strong concerns. Some of the negative impacts imputed to the use of indicators stemmed from risks inherent in quantitative ways of knowing. For example, while there were myriad methods for measuring—as well as a plethora of data on—some issues, in other places, there was a dearth of data on issues central to human rights. Further, the enduring and irresolvable problem of venal political manipulation of data was acknowledged, as well as the predatory or abusive methods sometimes used to gather data. Finally, the slippage between the concept one intended to measure and the choice of often-distant proxies was common but too often overlooked. Other unintended consequences related to the fact that the indicators phenomenon is an instance of power-through-knowledge, or ‘expert rule’, that empowered certain kinds of professional human rights expertise shared among an identifiable epistemic community while ousting others. This empowerment sometimes came at the expense of grassroots, ‘local’ or embedded forms of knowledge. The ‘deployment of statistical measures tends to replace political debate with technical expertise’, Merry wrote in 2011. In a piece published the same year, I explored similar dynamics in the use of rights-based indicators in crisis settings, concluding that indicators ended to ‘render technical’ very political debates over human rights and accountability. Merry wrote in 2016 that the ‘translation’ of rights into numbers ‘shifts human rights from a legal discourse with a broad and flexible vision of justice and rights to a technocratic one of economics and management’. This vison—which assumes the predictability of, control over and therefore possibility of rational management of social and political change—was a model for understanding the world that was seen as particularly ill-suited to human rights. The danger that states would seek to ‘game’ indicators instead of using them to measure rights enjoyment was also raised, suggesting an ever-increasing gap between the right being monitored and the metrics used to do so. This gap was especially problematic in relation to norms that had not yet been fully articulated by authoritative human rights bodies. These issues and others were explored in Merry’s ethnographic accounts of indicator-creation, as well as in my work, and the work of Merry’s collaborators, colleagues and those her work has influenced. A decade later, and in a datafied but increasingly ‘post-truth’ world, it seems useful to ask: have the concerns so eloquently articulated by scholars such as Sally Merry come to fruition in the human rights sphere? Has ‘“indicator culture”—marked by technical rationality, a pragmatic approach to measurement, and the magic of numbers’—taken root in the human rights field? More specifically, has the monitoring of rights become a system of technocratic audit? To answer these questions, this chapter focuses on the use of indicators to measure fulfilment of the rights to water and sanitation, two of the rights arguably most amenable to quantification. Using a dataset designed for this purpose, the chapter examines the use of indicators, benchmarks and quantitative data concerning water and sanitation by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR, the Committee), the body charged with monitoring compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, the Covenant). The chapter also draws on a second dataset assembled for this purpose that assesses the use by human rights NGOs of data and indicators in the context of advocacy to advance the rights to water and sanitation. What these data reveal is surprising: despite the relative ease of quantification and the broad use of rights-relevant data in the water and sanitation sector, the UN human rights experts charged with monitoring compliance with the ICESCR are not engaging in data-inflected assessments of these rights in a systematic way. Instead, they sporadically refer to data but do not deploy it or engage in datafied discussions that could simplify the tracking of progress or retrogression over time. The final section of this chapter explores some reasons behind this seeming rejection of the seductions of quantification. The chapter concludes that the analyses advanced by Merry in the past decade nonetheless retain their relevance, and should be brought to bear on the more recent embrace of Big Data in the broader human rights field.
Source Publication
The Complexity of Human Rights: From Vernacularization to Quantification: Essays in Honour of Sally Engle Merry
Source Editors/Authors
Philip Alston
Publication Date
2024
Recommended Citation
Satterthwaite, Margaret L., "The Seductions of Quantification Rebuffed? The Curious Failure by the CESCR to Engage Water and Sanitation Data" (2024). Faculty Chapters. 1116.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1116
