ABSTRACT
The current slogan of the United Nations Statistical Commission “Better Data, Better Lives” captures the longstanding and widespread belief that better information will lead not only to better collective decision-making but also to better individual results. In line with this instrumental view, the 2020 World Population and Housing Census Program of the United Nations (UN) regards nationally implemented population censuses as a primary source of data needed for policy formulation, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. This view has become even more salient since the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development relies on population and housing censuses in order to develop many of the indicators operationalizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While today, more territories than ever participate in the Census Program, censuses as a political instrument of information gathering have come under various forms of pressure, which increases the challenge of orchestrating such a massive global endeavor extending over a period of ten years. Among the current pressures on the census are:
New (and old) political controversies about who should be counted and which identity categories to apply (if any);
The increasing relevance of numbers as part of the indispensable epistemic infrastructure of global governance, modern statehood, and public critique, which has also contributed to making the production of official statistics a target of political interference, a problem that had never vanished from the UN agenda on statistical capacity building in the Global South, but has reemerged as an issue of concern in countries of the Global North as well;
Critique directed at the tangible and intangible costs associated with the traditional census together with new developments in information technology, which has recently increased the pressure for methodological innovations in census taking, creating a very open situation, in which the dominant global model is increasingly facing competition from new forms, which are put to the test in different parts of the world;
The COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in logistical problems and often the postponement of national census implementation. The pandemic might prove to be a critical juncture for national statistical systems, one that could catalyze methodological innovations, but also one that could hamper census taking in significant ways.
