From my overachieving years in Model UN as a high school student, I’m familiar with SDGs and the impossibility of actually enacting change through multinational organizations such as those that make up the UN. But, I haven’t thought much (or at least not recently) about access to data for measuring compliance and progress toward meeting the goals. This was the most unfamiliar aspect of our conversations this week. The science and politics that together have to go into accounting for the data received is immensely frustrating because of the lack of reliability which that combo seems to produce. How much can we really trust the data passed along by individual countries to measure progress toward SDGs?

What is even more intriguing is thinking about how those who are compiling the data are making judgments about what the data is actually telling them in order to determine compatibility from country to country. Just trying to wrap my mind around what that process might look like is creating thoroughly complex equations in my head which I don’t have the tools to solve. And yet it is also pointing to a soft side of statistical analysis which is perhaps more closely related to the humanities than the hard sciences. Those working with the data received from country to country are in a sense having to make judgements about the countries’ motivations for presenting data in certain ways, about what the data is really revealing. They aren’t just dealing with concrete numbers. This is in a sense obvious, and yet we often don’t treat data in this way at first glance. Or do we?