Understanding SDG5 Targets at the Site of Development: The Contested Terrain of Knowledge Production within Organizations

International agendas for development are increasingly codified into metrics and targets to hold countries accountable to action. The demand for science-like data to demonstrate progress and substantiate ‘what works’ is immense and polished infographics with statistics on the problem to be solved or the progress made are omnipresent. Transnational evaluation systems have become a key component of any international development project. These systems create a chain of knowledge production through data collection at the project site and numerous points of data aggregation to report on project results. This paper interrogates the role target-setting plays in locally-embedded, complex social processes like women’s empowerment and gender mainstreaming attempts by exploring what is created in the presence of quantified targets and what is left in its wake.

This paper is based on 45 interviews with gender, evaluation, and management professionals in East African countries donor headquarters around a bilaterla donoro' mandted evaluation system for an agricultural development initiative. I argue closer attention to the proliferating effects set in motion by a global interest in ‘data driven decisions’ and ‘evidence based policy’ is merited, especially when applied to transformative development agendas. Where the demand for data to inform science policy meets gender, women and girls may lose out. Understanding what targets ‘do’ around difficult-to-measure concepts such as women’s empowerment provides a useful case for understanding how metrics and targets help induce accountability to international goals, while creating proliferating effects as they travel the globe and work their way into the daily agendas of development professionals and organizations tasked with implementing ‘development’. I argue that if concerted and sustainable progress is to be made on SDG5 we must first understand the local site of development as a contested space of professional and organizational pressures and demands.