Statistical Innovation in the Global South

Abstract

This article proposes a comparative socio-economic history of quantification in Ecuador, Brazil, Ghana and Sierra Leone. It narrows in on censuses in the Global South as sites of methodological and infrastructural innovation in the context of global circulations of model population data systems, methodological standards, and material infrastructures. Specifically, the authors ask which arrangements of actors, norms and settings are involved in the reception, translation and adaptation of statistical innovation and how uneven relations and compositions of power between and within these fields shape the process of transmission. Distilling from their explorative, hermeneutic approach, the authors explore the mechanisms that link variously positioned political fields (Bourdieu, 1985) in the production and implementation of statistical innovation in the Global South. Four mechanisms are identified that shape statistical innovation as process of reception of globally circulating models and ideas as well as their adaptations into specific fields, all of which have differentiated effects and play under certain conditions in parallel or combined ways: 1) interventionist impulses from international organizations, 2) commercial and institutional brokerage, 3) initiatives from local professional communities, and 4) effects of political instabilities.