Elements of Controversy in Technical Manuals to Support the Production of Social Statistics for Development
Social statistics are fundamental in discussions regarding the problems of underdevelopment and justify the implementation of programs to address these same issues. Thus, multilateral organizations have a strong need for statistics to measure, classify and compare multiple aspects of social life such as health, education and poverty. To produce these statistics, they rely on the expertise of national agencies. This article explores the controversial aspects of expert discourse by analysing a recent corpus of ten technical manuals produced by various multilateral organizations like the OECD, the World Bank, WHO, UNDP and Unesco. The analysis of the representation of decision-making, deliberation, debate, controversy and conflict reveals that these manuals are not free of controversy on both methodological and scientific as well as on micro and macro policy levels.