Data infrastructures and digital technologies are reshaping how development is governed, experienced, and contested. From credit systems in urban Brazil to the experimental platforms of humanitarian aid, the politics of data is never neutral: numbers and digital tools can entrench inequality, but they also generate new possibilities for accountability, resistance, and alternative imaginaries. This roundtable brings together interdisciplinary perspectives that foreground both the power and the fragility of data-driven development.

The discussion examines how financial and statistical systems create and reproduce asymmetries in development, and how these infrastructures are negotiated, challenged, and repurposed in practice. Contributions explore the gendered dynamics of digital credit and debt; the contested reliability, authority, and politics of official development statistics; and the growing financialization of sustainability metrics. Turning to crisis and welfare domains, the roundtable also considers the entanglements of humanitarianism and digital infrastructures, including the politics of digital identity systems and the experimental “hacks” through which aid actors attempt to govern uncertainty, target beneficiaries, and demonstrate impact.

Across these empirical arenas, speakers trace how quantification and datafication reshape citizenship, eligibility, and accountability—often by translating complex social worlds into legible indicators, scores, and categories—while also producing frictions, failures, and openings for critique. The roundtable asks: how are infrastructures of quantification and datafication reshaping development today? What forms of expertise and authority do they enable, and what exclusions do they produce? And how might critical scholarship and collective action reimagine alternative, more equitable digital and datafied futures? By placing research on credit and debt, development statistics, sustainability metrics, and humanitarian technologies into dialogue, the session aims to foster a shared debate on the politics, limits, and possibilities of data-driven development.

Speakers:

• Marie Kolling - Danish Institute for International Studies
• Morten Jerven - Edinburgh University
• Isadora Cruxên - Queen Mary University of London
• Margaret Cheesman - King's College of London
• Sofie Elbæk Henriksen - University of Copenhagen