Description
Understanding the politics of demographic and health surveys reveals the histories and economies that shape if and how knowledge is produced and the implications of this for global development. This paper interrogates how and why demographic and health surveys originated and their political histories, conceptualising how ‘survey real estate’ commodifies questions and creates silences. Drawing on in-depth interviews with global health data experts (n=54), this paper exposes how iterations of surveys have failed to account for changing political and social realities, entrenching a complicated and problematic entanglement with eugenics and colonialism that centres on control of women’s bodies. Demographic concepts of harmonisation and comparability become political projects that allow only certain realities to exist. Further comparative analysis of surveys in the ‘Global North’ and ‘South’ illustrates these political histories in action, as surveys in the ‘Global South’ continue to focus on comparability to decades-old variables and consistency across time-series at the expensive of expansive, holistic, and necessary updates to how SRHR is understood and for whom it is important. Survey histories and economies combine with the operationalisation of scientific ‘expertise’ to override contextual grounding, and power dynamics between stakeholders involved in the development of survey instruments exemplify the politics of ‘development’.
