The Seduction of Quantification Rebuffed? The Curious Failure by the CESCR to Engage Water and Sanitation Data

The Seduction of Quantification Rebuffed? The Curious Failure by the CESCR to Engage Water and Sanitation Data

Description

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.

First Page

247

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5040/9781509972890.ch-013

Source Publication

The Complexity of Human Rights: From Vernacularization to Quantification

Source Editors/Authors

Philip Alston

Publication Date

2-26-2024

Publisher

Hart Publishing

The Seduction of Quantification Rebuffed? The Curious Failure by the CESCR to Engage Water and Sanitation Data

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