The declaration of the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 brought together 193 nations, with all their diverse priorities and challenges, and all their historical, economic, political and cultural differences, to commit to a common set of 17 critical, highly ambitious global goals. While there has previously been (near) global commitment to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), what sets the SDGs apart is that the goals are comprehensive, global and purposeful; they are accompanied by standardised indicators that make them measurable; there is a globally agreed strategy for achieving the goals; and member nations have committed to reporting on their progress and to be globally monitored on the basis of this reporting.

What does it take to bring together diverse views and representations to generate a collective, global, consensus view that gains not only acceptance at a given moment, but on-going commitment? Even ‘national’ views are difficult to generate – views are often strongly contested within nations, and the views of experts, politicians, philanthropists, NGOs, IGOs etc., are often both politically and epistemically divergent, incorporating practical knowledge, specialised expertise, and contextual and political understandings (Jasanoff 2017; Latour 1993). UNESCO’s task is not just one of getting all nations to agree on some technical definitions and indicators (though that is no trivial task – see, for example, (Gorur, 2018); it is also a political task that requires convincing, cajoling, compromising and coercing various actors to generate agreed understandings and maintaining their commitment through a variety of challenges over a period that spans more than one election cycle in most nations.

In this paper, we empirically examine how the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), in its role as the custodian of data for SDG4, develops consensus on measuring and monitoring the education SDG (SDG4) to make two key contributions. First, building on Jasanoff’s theory of global, consensus views as views from everywhere, we argue that the view forged by UIS is more appropriately understood as a view from elsewhere. We argue that the concept of views from elsewhere is particularly important in the context of global pressures on middle- and low-income nations whose epistemic traditions, situated understandings and social and political priorities are often overlooked, ignored, or forged by global agencies and experts. Second, and relatedly, we provide an empirical account of how such views from elsewhere are developed, based on detailed accounts of meetings convened by the UIS Technical Cooperation Group. We describe these processes as collecting, connecting and compounding views. Here we exploit the dual understanding of the verb ‘to compound’, evoking both the pharmacy compounder who mixes together different components to produce cures and chemical compounds which may look and feel entirely different to their component parts. These processes enable an understanding of how strenuously global agencies need to work to herd diverse political and epistemic cultures into various types of collectives to generate collective views, and how these views are orchestrated by those authorised to broker such views.

This paper analyses how the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), in its role as the custodian of data for SDG4, develops consensus on measuring and monitoring the education SDG (SDG4). Inspired by Science and Technology (STS) approaches and building on Sheila Jasanoff’s understanding of collective ways of seeing and civic epistemologies, we analyse 92 descriptors of TCG meetings on the Group’s website. We examine various structural arrangements, such as consultations, how open consultations, meetings and surveys, through which diverse actors as assembled and views generated. We examine how these actors and views are put into various relations through which connections are established and consolidated. One example of this work of establishing relations is the setting up of Working Groups, which connected ‘political’, ‘technical’, and ‘social’ representations by engaging in co-generative practices with Member Countries, Expert Organisations, and Civil Society. This leads us to the idea of ‘compounding,’ which signals the emergence of something larger than the sum of specific parts or elements such as the UIS’s claim of global consensus derived from the consultation and inputs it brings together from different types of representations. The focus on compounding provides empirical purchase on these processes of collecting and connecting, which might otherwise appear mundane and unremarkable.

Our empirical focus on the working of the TCG provides only a small glimpse of the large machinery that has been animated by the SDGs. But the mundane and unremarkable processes are often the channels through which politics is performed (Woolgar & Neyland 2013). Our argument that the TCG’s consensus view is not a benign and apolitical view from everywhere but a strenuously produced view from elsewhere is not a denunciation of the process or the 2030 Agenda for SDG4. Rather, it invites a more informed understanding of the key processes by which policies and practices are being enacted by global elites. A view from everywhere sounds unproblematic and universally acceptable – it does not adequately capture epistemic, economic, political and other costs and inequities which are baked into both the processes of generating collective global views and their ongoing and amplificatory effects. We contend that the term view from elsewhere signals the disruptions and discomforts that come with such apparently global collective views. In making this argument through an empirical demonstration, we disrupt the depoliticised narrative of global consensus, and call attention to the marginalisation and the epistemic processes involved in the forging of global indicators and reform agendas.

Jasanoff, S. (2017). Virtual, visible, and actionable: Data assemblages and the sightlines of justice. Big Data & Society, 4(2), 205395171772447. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717724477 Latour, B. (1993). The Pasteurization of France (A. Sheridan & J. Law, Trans.; First Harvard University Press paperback ed). Harvard Univ. Press Gorur, R. (2018). Standards: Normative, Interpretive, Performative. In S. Lindblad, D. Pettersson, & T. S. Popkewitz (Eds.), Education by the Numbers and the Making of Society (1st ed., pp. 92–109). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315100432-9 Woolgar, S., & Neyland, D. (2013). Mundane governance: Ontology and accountability. OUP Oxford.