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Accepted Paper:
Quantifying vulnerability: the vulnerability assistance framework as an empirical investigation into UN humanitarian data production
Daniel Kryger
(University of Washington, Seattle Campus)
This empirical study traces a UN data supply chain in Jordan used to inform a cross-cutting set of humanitarian priorities, from operational needs to global comparability. Provisional findings point to how 'uncertainty' can be leveraged to align diverse stakeholders in humanitarian response.
Long abstract:
Since 2014, the UN humanitarian response in Jordan has used the Vulnerability Assistance Framework (VAF) initiative to produce data monitoring the situation in Jordan, enable comparisons with other humanitarian emergencies globally, and determining eligibility and prioritization of refugees for assistance. Making this data, and making it interoperable in these different domains, are an overlapping set of multinational, governmental, non-profit, and private-sector actors. Through a material-semiotic methodological approach inspired by Latour's Actor-Network Theory, I interview relevant staff and review the VAF bureaucratic literature in order to trace this data production pipeline and how these competing priorities are navigated. My preliminary findings point to the flexible operationalization of 'uncertainty' which enable the building of consensus across various technical and political domains. This empirical work has the potential to contribute to the academic literatures as a case study on data production and algorithmic governance.