Quantifying water and sanitation in development cooperation : power or perversity?

For more than half a century, domestic water issues have constituted a theme of international cooperation and, since 1976, a subject of quantitative target setting. In this paper, we critical analyze two early periods of target setting together with their most recent incarnation in the 2000/1 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In this arc, we identify two stories concerning the utility of a turn to metrics: The first is a perennial and at times justified optimism in target setting and the second is a more cautionary tale about the dangers of measurement and its tendency to paper over challenging but significant issues. In a final section, we offer some brief conclusions on the implications for the post-2015 agenda and some potential alternative measurement routes to tread.[author abstract]

This paper is one of a series of papers in a research project, The Power of Numbers: A Critical Review of MDG Targets for Human Development and Human Rights (the "Project").