André Broome

Global benchmarks have grown exponentially over the last two decades, having been both applied to and developed by states, international organisations, corporations, and non-governmental organisations. As a consequence, global benchmarking is now firmly established as a distinct mode of transnational governance. Benchmarking chiefly involves the development of comparative metrics of performance, which typically take the form of highly stylised comparisons which are generated by translating complex phenomena into numerical values via simplification and extrapolation, commensuration, reification, and symbolic judgements. This process of translation takes what might otherwise be highly contentious normative agendas and converts them into formats that gain credibility through rhetorical claims to neutral and technocratic assessment. This politics of numbers has far-reaching ramifications for transnational governance, including the dimensions and effects of indirect power, expertise and agenda-setting, coordination, regulation and certification, and norm contestation and activism. This Special Issue draws upon an emerging literature to explore how and why benchmarks both align with and expand upon established models of International Relations theory and scholarship. It does so by critically examining the role of global benchmarks in key areas such as state ‘failure’, global supply chains, disaster management, economic governance, corporate social responsibility, and human development.

New practices and institutions of global governance are often one of the most enduring consequences of global crises. The contemporary architecture of global governance has been widely criticized for failing to prevent the global financial crisis and Eurozone debt crises, for failing to provide robust international crisis management and leadership, and for failing to generate a consensus around new ideas for regulating markets in the broader public interest. Global Governance in Crisis explores the impact of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 on the architecture and practice of contemporary global governance, and traces the long-term implications of the crisis for the future of the global order. Combining innovative theoretical approaches with rich empirical cases, the book examines how the impact of the global financial crisis has played out across a range of global governance domains, including development, finance and debt, trade, and security.

The production of transnational knowledge that is widely recognized as legitimate is a major source of influence for international organizations (IOs). To reinforce their expert status, IOs increasingly produce global benchmarks that measure national performance across a range of issue areas. This article illustrates how IO benchmarking is a significant source of indirect power in world politics by examining two prominent cases in which IOs seek to shape the world through comparative metrics: (1) the World Bank–International Finance Corporation Ease of Doing Business ranking; and (2) the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness Index. We argue that the legitimacy attached to these benchmarks because of the expertise of the IOs that produce them is highly problematic for two reasons. First, both benchmarks oversimplify the evaluation of relative national performance, misrepresenting contested political values drawn from a specific transnational paradigm as empirical facts. Second, they entrench an arbitrary division in the international arena between 'ideal' and 'pathological' types of national performance, which (re)produces social hierarchies among states. We argue that the ways in which IOs use benchmarking to orient how political actors understand best practices, advocate policy changes, and attribute political responsibility thus constitutes 'bad science'. Extending research on processes of paradigm maintenance and the influence of IOs as teachers of norms or judges of norm compliance, we show how the indirect power that IOs exercise as evaluators of relative national performance through benchmarking can be highly consequential for the definition of states' policy priorities.

International organizations (IOs) such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are assumed to rely on 'sympathetic interlocutors' at the national level to drive through economic reforms that conform to global policy norms. In this article we answer the following question: How do sympathetic interlocutors for IOs emerge in the first place? We address this question by examining how IOs engage in teaching norms to national officials via transnational policy training in order to increase the number of domestic reformers who are sympathetic to their prescriptions for policy change. We provide a conceptual framework for understanding how IOs seek to use their own cognitive authority to foster 'diagnostic coordination' across technocratic economic policy communities. This encourages officials to adapt to a common policy language and delimits the policy space within which they identify and propose solutions to economic problems.

Global benchmarks have grown exponentially over the last two decades, having been both applied to and developed by states, international organisations, corporations, and non-governmental organisations. As a consequence, global benchmarking is now firmly established as a distinct mode of transnational governance. Benchmarking chiefly involves the development of comparative metrics of performance, which typically take the form of highly stylised comparisons which are generated by translating complex phenomena into numerical values via simplification and extrapolation, commensuration, reification, and symbolic judgements. This process of translation takes what might otherwise be highly contentious normative agendas and converts them into formats that gain credibility through rhetorical claims to neutral and technocratic assessment. This politics of numbers has far-reaching ramifications for transnational governance, including the dimensions and effects of indirect power, expertise and agenda-setting, coordination, regulation and certification, and norm contestation and activism. This Special Issue draws upon an emerging literature to explore how and why benchmarks both align with and expand upon established models of International Relations theory and scholarship. It does so by critically examining the role of global benchmarks in key areas such as state ‘failure’, global supply chains, disaster management, economic governance, corporate social responsibility, and human development.

Benchmarking practices have rapidly diffused throughout the globe in recent years. This can be traced to their popularity amongst non-state actors, such as civil society organisations and corporate actors, as well as states and international organisations (IOs). Benchmarks serve to both ‘neutralise’ and ‘universalise’ a range of overlapping normative values and agendas, including freedom of speech, democracy, human development, environmental protection, poverty alleviation, ‘modern’ statehood, and ‘free’ markets. The proliferation of global benchmarks in these key areas amounts to a comprehensive normative vision regarding what various types of transnational actors should look like, what they should value, and how they should behave. While individual benchmarks routinely differ in terms of scope and application, they all share a common foundation, with normative values and agendas being translated into numerical representations through simplification and extrapolation, commensuration, reification, and symbolic judgements. We argue that the power of benchmarks chiefly stems from their capacity to create the appearance of authoritative expertise on the basis of forms of quantification and numerical representation. This politics of numbers paves the way for the exercise of various forms of indirect power, or ‘governance at a distance’, for the purposes of either status quo legitimation or political reform.