Global Ambitions, Local Contexts: Alternative Ways of Knowing the World
Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands
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ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2019, 8(11), 516; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi8110516
Received: 1 November 2019 / Accepted: 4 November 2019 / Published: 15 November 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geo-Information and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs))
In this Special Issue, we bring together contributions from authors in the scientific discipline Geo-Information Science who engaged with the question: How does Geo-Information Science contribute to the development of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicators? The editorial to the Special Issue situates the individual contributions in a broader social science debate, which critically examines the quantification of global policy goals and its effects on how we know and govern the world. We put forward concepts of ‘measuring the world’ and a brief history of the Geo-Information Science discipline, including its dominant positivist paradigm as well as scholarly debates that reflected on and shifted that paradigm. Given the global policy focus of the SDGs, we also briefly discuss policy science paradigms. We analyze the individual articles with regard to their contribution to the SDG indicator development trajectory. We also show how alternative ways of knowing and governing the world complement the dominant positivist paradigm.
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Keywords:
sustainable development goals; indicators; geo-information science; ontology; policy making
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Pfeffer, K.; Georgiadou, Y. Global Ambitions, Local Contexts: Alternative Ways of Knowing the World. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2019, 8, 516.
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