Human Rights And Governance: Indicators And Audit Culture | Sunita Samal

Abstract: The genealogy of indicator calls the ‘modern fact’ as a form of knowledge. The modern fact is the basis to the ways westerns has come to know the world. Numbers are the epitome of the modern facts because they seem to be simple description of phenomena and to resists the biases. Numbers have become they seem to be free of interpretation and be neutral. The question is how does quantification contribute to systematic knowledge about the world. Establishing the understanding of numbers as an objective description was a project of modernity.

Introduction: The idea that numbers guarantee value-free description is still pervasive1 [1]. Indicators are rapidly multiplying as a tool for assessing and promoting a variety of social justice and reform strategies around the world. The origins of indicators as modes of knowledge and governance stretch back to the creation of modern nation-states in the nineteenth century. The reliance on simplified numerical representations of complex phenomena began in strategies of national governance and economic analysis and has recently migrated to the regulation of non-governmental organizations and human rights.

Indicators, and Audit Culture: The turn of indicators to the field of global governance introduces a new form of knowledge production with implications for relations of power between rich and poor nations and between government and civil society. The growing reliance on indicators provides an example of the dissemination of the corporate form of thinking and governance into broader social spheres.

Although indicators are widely used in reform initiatives at the global level under the auspices of the United Nations and International NGOs, they are also increasingly important to corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. The UN Global Compact (UNGC) and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) are two of the most significant entities rely increasingly on indicators promoting corporate social responsibilities. There are also NGOs developing toolkits to measure corporate compliance with human rights standards.

Development agencies such as the World Bank have created a wide range of indicators including indicators of global governance and rule of law. Gross domestic product is one of the most widely used and accepted indicators. Thus, the growing reliance on indicators is an instance of the dissemination of the corporate form of thinking and governance into a broader social sphere.

Technologies of audit and performance evaluation common in the corporate world now reach into many domains of global governance. Since mid-1990s, technologies that were developed in the sphere of business regulation have jumped domains of human rights and corporate social responsibilities (CSR). However, in accordance with contemporary audit culture these efforts place responsibility for gathering information and assessing it on the organization themselves. The Global Reporting Initiative also providers for stakeholders’ discussion of the relevant indicators that they will use and some of the human rights tool kits are flexible2 [2].

Indicators are rapidly multiplying as a tool for assessing and promoting a variety of social justice and reform strategies around the world. There are indicators of rule of law, indicators of violence against women and indicators of economic development among many others. There are increasing demands for evidence-based funding for non-governmental organizations which need performance of good indicators. These are also needed for quantifying and measuring the results of civil society organizations3 [3].

Power Dynamics and Identity Formation: The use of statistical information in general and indicators in particular shifts the power dynamics of decision-making. Indicators replace judgments on the basis of values or politics with apparently more rational decision-making based on statistical information. In theory, this process is more open, allowing the public access to the basis of decisions4 [4].

Technologies of audit and performance evaluation common in the corporate world, now reach into many domains of global governance. Since the mid-1990s, technologies that are developed in the sphere of business regulation have jumped to domains of human rights and corporate social responsibilities. Interest in using indicators to monitor human rights compliance has grown significantly. Numerical measures are visible forms of violation and inequality that are otherwise obscured. Statistics on income, health, education and torture, for example, are useful to assess compliance with human rights norms and progress in improving human rights conditions.

The question is how much corporations participate in the same forms of identity formations of individual. Consumer movements have impact on the financial consequences of corporate social irresponsibility by boycotting goods produced by corporations. It is also argued that corporate form shapes the way individuals are understood in current period. So, it is not surprising that corporations are reciprocally understood as social beings with identities and reputations.

Numerical measures produce a world knowable without the detailed particulars of context or history. The constituent units can be compared and ranked according to some criteria. This knowledge is presented as objective and often scientific. One of the critical ways an indicator produces knowledge is by announcing what it measures such as ‘rule of law’ or ‘poverty’. Neither of these categories are self-evident. Here, the question is who decides what they represent, is fundamental to the way an indicator produces power.

Here, this knowledge is presented as objective and often as scientific. These numbers seem open to public scrutiny and readily an accessible in a way that private opinion is not. A key dimension of power of indicators is their capacity to convert complicated contextually variable phenomena into unambiguous, clear, and impersonal measures. It submerges local particularities into universal categories and thus generating knowledge that is standardized and comparable across nations and regions.

Governance-based Funding: The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights is developing more sophisticated indicators to facilitate the analysis of information and increase accountability. Indicators particularly those that rely on ranks of numbers convey an aura of objective truth and facilitate comparisons. However, sometimes indicators typically conceal their political and theoretical origins that affect the fulfilment of human rights.

The world of civil society organizations has also been transformed by the increasing use of statistical measures. They are demands for quantifying the accomplishments of civil society organizations and for evidence-based funding. Donors to human rights organizations want indicators of success such as a reduction in trafficking in persons or diminished rates of poverty and disease. The concept of ‘venture philanthropy’ underscores this new perspective. Recipient organizations are tasked to develop measurements of what they have accomplished within the period of funding. Increased awareness of human rights NGOs tends to count proxies for this accomplishment such as a number of training sessions or number of people trained.

As Porter (1995) points out, although the categories of enumerator may be highly contingent at first, once they are in place that comes to take on permanent existence as a form of knowledge. One of the most well-known examples of the process is the introduction of the census in India by British colonial authorities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries5 [5].

Statistical knowledge grew in importance with the birth of the modern states. The first in Europe came in 1820s and 1830s and by the mid-nineteenth century in France; statistics were thought to produce broad public knowledge necessary for a democracy. Quantification produces an openness to public scrutiny. The massive expression of quantification in recent times comes from a political culture and demand more openness and seeks to drive out corruption, prejudice and arbitrary power of elites what Porter claims is the power of numbers.

To increase legibility, the population census classified individuals by caste, religion, gender, and other criteria. The British arranged the caste in an orderly hierarchy and sought to collect ‘objective’ information about caste identities. In place of a wide range of forms of ritual and social exclusion in practice, the British selected pollution by truth as the key marker of low caste status. Thus, the category ‘untouchability’ merged as a distinct, all-India category. By defining castes in terms of categories that applied across the subcontinent the British rendered caste into a far more fixed and intractable social entity but one that could be more readily counted and compared6 [6].

Indicators provide technology for reform as well as control. These can effectively highlight deficits, areas of inequalities, spheres of human rights violations, and other problems. As indicators become increasingly central to global reform and global governance it is critical to examine how they are produced how the knowledge they create affect global power relationships, the influence of the allocation of resources, the nature of political decisions.

Indicators are statistical measures that are used to consolidate complex data into simple number or rank that is meaningful to policymakers and the public. They are standardized knowledge and ignore individual specificity. Although indicators are quantitative—express in rates, percentage or, some are based on qualitative information converted into numbers.

A recent effort to develop indicators for the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) for example, uses quantitative indicators such as liberating rates, and maternal mortality rates along with qualitative indicators such as the existence of legislation concerning equal inheritance rights, policies addressing quotas for girl children in educational institutions and programs of legal aid services and shelter for women victims of violence. These qualitative measures are quantified by counting the laws and the number of shelters respectively7 [7].

Until the late 1990s, many human rights activists resisted the use of indicators because of concern about lack of data bias and oversimplification8 [8]. UN agencies such as UNICEF, UNIFEM, The Office of the High-Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR) and UN Statistical Commission are taking the lead. A set of indicators has been developed for Millenium Development Goals. Many economic and social indicators such as the World Bank worldwide, Governance indicators and UNDP Human Development Index are used to asses compliance with social and economic human rights.

The recent shift to a right based approach to development has brought human rights and development closer together and encouraged the use of economically based indicators for human Development Report devoted a chapter to the value of indicators for human rights accountability. Economists at the World Bank have also played a critical role in developing indicators for international investments. Within social sciences, however, there has been considerable attention to the impact on practices of governance of these new political technologies based on statistics and accountability which has been called ‘audit culture9’ [9]. Here, audit technologies are theorized as instruments for new forms of governance and power10 [10].

Between Political and Technical: The creation of indicators reveals a slippage between the political and the technical nature. The slippage occurs in the way issues and problems are defined in the identity and role of experts in the relative power of people engaged in producing clout of the sponsoring organization. Nevertheless, indicators are inevitably politically rooted in particular conceptions of problems and theories of responsibility. They represent the perspectives and framework of those who produce them as well as their political and financial power11 [11]. The turn to indicator marks a shift in the way the administration of human rights and development. Instead of pressuring countries to conform to human rights law on the basis of ambiguous and contextualized accounts in country reports or case studies indicators provide comparable information in numerical terms. The reliance on numbers with their apparently simple and straightforward meaning, produces an unambiguous and easily replicated field for judgment.

Quantification became increasingly important as a technology of governance in nineteenth-century Europe. Quantification with its aura of objectivity, became increasingly important to a variety of government and business function in the nineteenth century. It is striking that all of the global governance indicators projects are created in the global North while data collections are mostly taken from the global South. As tools of governance, indicators are commonly developed by powerful bodies seeking to manage and control populations or allocate resources. They may also be used to rank countries or organizations or determine benefit eligibility.

Many indicators promote self-management which Nicholas Rose (1984) described as ‘Government at a distance’12 [12]. In liberal democracies of the post-war period, citizens are to regulate themselves to become active participant in the process rather than objects of domination. Rose dates the formation of this self-managing system of governance to the 1950s but sees a major expansion during the era of neo-realism.

Conclusion: Despite the increase in democratic openness produced by the use of statistics in decision -making, it tends to consolidate power in the hands of those with expert knowledge. In the area of contemporary global governance and human rights have an increased reliance on indicators tends to locate decision -making in the global North where data are mostly collected from South and these indicators are typically designed and labeled. In many situations the turn to indicators as a mode of governance does not eliminate the role of private knowledge and elite power in decision-making but replaces it with technical, statistical expertise. Now the boundaries between the market, the state, and civil society blur. As the world becomes ever more measured and tracked through indicators, it becomes increasingly important to sort out the technical and political dimensions of this new technology.

(Author: Sunita Samal is author of multiple books. one of the books is titled ‘Human Rights and International Order: in the context of liberalism, civil society and rule of law’ (2023) publisher: Asian Press Books, Kolkata, India)