Short Abstract

As statistics have become central to governance, major efforts are devoted to their harmonization. How is the equivalence of statistical objects established across contexts, and on whose authority? The panel explores practices, politics, and consequences of harmonization across scales and domains.

Description

From measuring economies through GDP to tracking progress via the Sustainable Development Goals, societies increasingly rely on statistics to understand and govern complex social, economic, and environmental phenomena. To enable comparability, international organizations, national statistical offices, expert communities, and others devote significant efforts to harmonizing definitions, classifications, and methods across diverse contexts, jurisdictions, and time periods (Desrosières 2000, 2009; Espeland & Stevens 1998). Yet harmonization is neither purely technical nor frictionless; it raises questions of how and on whose authority the equivalence of statistical objects is established.

Building on growing STS and sociological interest in quantification, this panel invites conceptual and empirical contributions that explore the practices, politics, and consequences of statistical harmonization and standardization across scales (international, supranational, national, subnational) and domains (economic, social, environmental, health).

We invite papers exploring the governance arrangements that enable harmonization, from soft coordination by international organizations and Eurostat's auditing power to the interventions of expert communities and NGOs. We are equally interested in the concrete practices, infrastructures, and methods through which harmonization is achieved, including how statistical offices manage classification transitions and how digitalization reshapes harmonization work.

The panel welcomes contributions studying the effects of harmonization, such as how standardized statistics create new forms of visibility, comparison, and governance, while marginalizing alternative ways of knowing; how they reproduce global power asymmetries; and how harmonization relates to broader processes of Europeanization and globalization. We also invite papers on resistance to and failures of harmonization, from states defending national traditions to counter-statistical projects, indigenous data sovereignty movements, and civil society efforts that challenge dominant frameworks.

Both historical and contemporary perspectives are welcome, from tracing the implementation of major standards like the System of National Accounts to examining how recent crises (COVID-19, economic shocks, climate change) have accelerated or contested demands for statistical standardization.

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