Fabricating non-knowledge: International organizations and the numerical construction of an evaluative world

Transnational governance is a particularly productive field for the study of the role of numbers as tools in governing societies. The role of numerical technologies is twofold. On one hand, International Organizations set up ambitious and seemingly unachievable goals, thus creating a vision of an unknown utopian future that can only be mastered through the production of knowledge. On the other, it is precisely the construction of a governable, manageable world that paradoxically, or inevitably, leads to production of non-knowledge: in such a world, actors that participate in its making, must be selective and actively and purposefully ignore inconvenient data, or, as this chapter illustrates, systematically disregard the development of some measurement tools versus others. Indeed, the rise of a global metrological field rests precisely upon the making and un-making of new political problems that become technicized, institutionalized and eventually legitimized as gaps in search of new, relevant knowledge for action.