Inspired by the seminal analyses of Developmentspeak, the dialect used in the development field, produced at the turn of the millennium, and feminist contributions in Science and Technology Studies (STS), this PhD thesis builds an epistemological critique of the 2030 Agenda taking Developmentspeak as an accurate proxy of the forces pushing and pulling international development agendas. Mixing qualitative and quantitative analysis, the methods pursued in this work unveil not only what development intends to be, but also how it might fall short from its own expectations. In simple terms, concepts and practices get disposed side by side in this work as a strategy to reveal how much of the elaborated and finely tuned discourse of official documents hits the ground. As a result, by tracking words, we track transformations going on in the field: discovering that some words remain, while some fade away, and that some concepts are included into official discourse with the purpose of producing euphemism, ambiguity or neutrality working many times as the spoonful of sugar that helps the bitter medicine of development go down. Two main concepts arise from this analysis: participation and data. As something old and something new, respectively, they help us to understand how the 2030 Agenda carries both ancient problematics and a novel façade. Considering the hyper-quantitative nature of the 2030 Agenda, the path that begins surrounded by discussions on the politics of language quickly evolves to places in which the main debates revolve around the politics of data.