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During the Covid crisis, while countries set up an unprecedented social protection response, international organisations quickly turned towards envisioning how to 'build back better' using social protection. Building on a qualitative document analysis, the article finds that international organisations frequently imagine the future through anticipations of protracted and multidimensional crises – often in quantified form. Arguing that futures are an ideational influence on policymaking, the article reconstructs two ways in which these crisis anticipations inform international organisations' social protection policy proposals: first, as legitimising narratives for expanding social protection; second, in the form of policy proposals that embed crisis anticipation in their design, as in the case of 'adaptive social protection'. The article shows that adaptive social protection departs from traditional social protection policy: it promotes strengthening individual, household and systemic resilience, and implementing preparedness as a governing rationale, thus moving from a focus on compensation and provision towards prevention.

Abstract
The article investigates the production of decent work indicators within the ILO, to demonstrate that developing measurement infrastructures in global policymaking requires political work. The concept of decent work responds to the perceived marginalization of the ILO in social and labor policy and was supposed to provide a new unifying normative framework for the organization. The article shows that creating decent work indicators encountered challenges due to its highly politicized production process. Proponents of quantification (mostly workers' representatives) and opponents (mostly employers' representatives) disagreed about the function of indicators: should they be country-specific or allow for universal assessment of progress from above. In effect, although indicators of decent work have been integrated into the Sustainable Development Goals—mostly as part of goal no. 8, many are still incomplete. As a result, the indicators did not establish a "framework of assessment," which would have been guided by universal standards of progress allowing the ILO to "govern at a distance," and could not initiate a paradigmatic policy shift, impeding the infrastructuralization of measurement. Theoretically, the article advances our understanding of policy formulation and design on the transnational level by showing the political foundation of knowledge-based instruments. Empirically, it rests on a Grounded Theory-based analysis of key ILO documents, including Governing Body minutes, conference and expert meeting reports, and official publications, mainly from the period from 1998 to 2015.

Despite social policy being one of the most quantified policy fields today, there is no singular indicator or set of indicators of social policy quality or performance on the global level that is universally accepted and influential, comparable to GDP in the economy. The article analyses and explains the unsuccessful indicatorisation in the ILO's International Survey of Social Services of the interwar years. During this first elaborate study of social policies worldwide by an international organisation, difficult issues of defining, comparing, and quantifying social policy had to be solved for the first time. Theoretically, a sociology of knowledge approach on indicatorisation is utilised that highlights how social policy was questioned and evaluated. This illustrates the demanding work of comparing including a politicized knowledge production, identifying conditions and hindrances of defining and quantifying the 'social'. It is observed that different interests of participants, epistemic cultures, and practices, as well as bureaucratic procedures resulted in the mere inclusion of a provisional indicator of cost and little quantified data in the final Survey. Empirically, the article relies on an in-depth analysis of historical ILO documents.

Despite social policy being one of the most quantified policy fields today, there is no singular indicator or set of indicators of social policy quality or performance on the global level that is universally accepted and influential, comparable to GDP in the economy. The article analyses and explains the unsuccessful indicatorisation in the ILO's International Survey of Social Services of the interwar years. During this first elaborate study of social policies worldwide by an international organisation, difficult issues of defining, comparing, and quantifying social policy had to be solved for the first time. Theoretically, a sociology of knowledge approach on indicatorisation is utilised that highlights how social policy was questioned and evaluated. This illustrates the demanding work of comparing including a politicized knowledge production, identifying conditions and hindrances of defining and quantifying the 'social'. It is observed that different interests of participants, epistemic cultures, and practices, as well as bureaucratic procedures resulted in the mere inclusion of a provisional indicator of cost and little quantified data in the final Survey. Empirically, the article relies on an in-depth analysis of historical ILO documents.

Many contemporary efforts to govern global challenges are driven by combinations of numbers and futures. This special section proposes the novel concept of 'quantified futures' as a way of grasping this widespread entanglement. Because existing scholarship has largely treated quantification and futurisation as discrete governing technologies, their intersections have remained undertheorised and underexplored. In this introductory article, we discuss similarities between quantification and futurisation to build an integrated analytical framework that outlines how quantified futures operate across transnational policy domains by shaping the salience, scope and urgency of global challenges and their solutions. The special section at large cautions against overly optimistic expectations regarding the capacity of quantified futures to tackle global challenges. Rather, it underscores the need to enquire into the mutually reinforcing effects between, on the one hand, the growing use of quantified futures and, on the other hand, the increase and diversification of global challenges.

Considering the socio‐economic and cultural diversity of the world, it is a bold undertaking by international organisations to propose welfare policies designed to apply to all or many countries. We argue that since the 1990s, new instruments of quantification have extended the knowledge base of international organisations, helping them to design and communicate policy proposals with a global scope. We map these numerical instruments in the field of basic income protection, showing that they serve to identify global social problems and to design global models of welfare. Three case studies illustrate the findings. To make sense of the spread of quantification, we draw on world society theory, arguing that the numerical instruments create a global space of observation, comparison and deliberation regarding social reform. We conclude that numerical instruments have facilitated the expansion of global social protection since the 1990s, but have also narrowed social concerns in the process.