The Sustainable Development Goals Confront the Infrastructure of Measurement

This brief article comments on the special issue on SDGs ‐ Knowledge and Politics in Setting and Measuring the SDGs. Acknowledging that the articles in the issue show how reliance on indicators changes the way development is conceived, Merry asks why is it so difficult to produce better indicators. If they are too narrow, why not simply produce more? She argues that conceiving of measurement as an infrastructure provides important insight into these questions.