Tero Erkkilä

(De)politicizing good governance: the World Bank Institute, the OECD and the politics of governance indicators

Since the early 1990s there has been a surge in international efforts to calculate the comparative performance of states in terms of various characteristics of governance. In this article we show how numerical objectification of social phenomena can function to depoliticize potentially political issues. As a case of example we examine the evolving field of measuring good governance through analyzing the documentation of the World Bank Institutes established Worldwide Governance Indicators and its recent contender, the OECD project “Government at a Glance”, which argues to provide an alternative to the existing rankings. Although we observe certain methodological discontinuities in measurement practices of the OECD, these have hardly been serious enough to activate its potential in repoliticisizing the issue of “good governance”. Moreover, the work of OECD further strengthens and legitimates the epistemic expert authority of global index producers.

Global Governance Indices as Policy Instruments: Actionability, Transparency and Comparative Policy Analysis

Abstract Global country rankings have faced criticism for their normative character and methodology. Because of this, there have been attempts at creating so-called actionable governance indicators that provide more detailed and reform-oriented measurements of governance. This article analyzes the policy process behind the rise of actionable governance indicators and related changes in the production and use of indicators. It argues that the evolution of measurements can be understood as a process of field structuration, where various actors are entering the field of global governance assessments with rival indicator sets. But as the new actors tend to reproduce ideas and practices that already exist in the field, there are rather limited methodological improvements in the indices. However, the new actionable indicators are likely to become more influential policy instruments than rankings. This can be seen as an unintended outcome of the critique of ranking that has sparked the development of actionability. Measurements of transparency are used for analyzing the changes in the field of global governance indicators.

Reforming Higher Education Institutions in Finland: Competitiveness and Global University Rankings

Over the last two decades, a new priority has come to define the agenda of European higher education policies: the need to make European universities more autonomous and competitive. While competitiveness is the end, competition is a means: compete internally and you will be sufficiently toughened up to meet your external competitive challenges. In this context, various university rankings, citation indexes and quantitative evaluations have come to play an ever greater role in academic life, providing society with both the criteria for separating winners from losers and the means to attain post hoc accountability. In this way ideas of competition tie together some of the most important concepts and practices governing the field of European higher education policy today.

Politics of Comparative Quantification: The Case of Governance Metrics

Numbers expose problems, help to institutionalize new domains of decision making, and make complex issues commensurable, giving them a common form. Numbers play a role in the construction of social...

Rankings and Global Knowledge Governance

Though the new indicators that are entering the field propose new methodological and conceptual openings, they instead offer mild contrasts to the previous figures and do not challenge the epistemic knowledge and practices of the field. In making these connections and their consequences visible through our analysis, we propose that rankings are a constitutive element of global knowledge governance. We observe a thickening of the political imaginary of competition, traversing the different levels of assessment from global to local. The fragmentation of indicators dents conceptual coherence and limits their relevance as tools of evaluation. Yet, their policy relevance remains high. Moreover, as indicator knowledge has become a universal language of transnational governance, it also limits what can be argued and presented as valid knowledge.

Ideational Background of Global Knowledge Governance

This chapter tracks the ideational landscape in which the global ranking in knowledge governance operate, focusing on the development and convergence of different policy-specific ideas that are, on the one hand, captured by and, on the other hand, affected by global rankings. We view global knowledge governance as based on an atomistic ontology that constructs reality as economic competition between states. Issues such as higher education and good governance are also perceived through the lens of economy, although we could just as well perceive them as matters of social mobility and democracy. This is due to current ideas of institutional economy that now influence perceptions of higher education and draw on codifications of good governance.

From Global to Local: Regional- and City-Level Alternatives to Global Rankings

This chapter discusses the recent tendency to localize the rankings and indicators on competitiveness, innovation, and higher education. The localization of ranking comes in the form of regional and city rankings, challenging the dominant imaginary assuming global comparability of similar units or the state-centric understanding of world order. Nevertheless, conceptually or methodologically regional and local alternatives hardly depart from the global indicators. Local variants often rely on familiar data sources and established data producers. They reproduce the old imagery of competition, but now on the city level of actorhood. In fact, due to the lack of urban data, many city rankings on innovation make use of national data employed by the established global indicators.

Rise of Global Rankings and the Competitive Logic

The development of the numbers-based knowledge governance framework is a relatively recent undertaking, but much has happened over the last 20 years. This chapter explores the rankings landscape as it was at the beginning of the 2000s, focusing on the most prominent “first generation” of measures of good governance, competition, and academic performance, characterized by aggregation of data and attempt for maximal geographical scope. It shows how measurement has actually functioned to depoliticize the notion of good governance and how rankings have reinforced atomistic subjectification processes that project higher education institutions as self-governing entities solely responsible for their own success. We see ideational and operational interlinkages between the measurements that we think have come to define global knowledge governance.

Theory: Rankings as Policy Instruments

Rankings are influential policy instruments, creating calculable social objects or “facts” that become governable. At present, different aspects of states’ knowledge production are being governed through external assessments and comparisons. Building on new institutionalism, Foucauldian governmentality, and political sociology, we provide a theoretical framework for understanding the mechanisms of influence behind the numerical assessments that helps to explain why rankings steer the policies of sovereign states. We also provide tools for understanding the dynamics of field development around the transnational production of numerical knowledge.

Field Structuration and Fragmentation of Global Rankings

In this chapter, we look closely at the fragmentation of rankings and indicators relevant to knowledge governance in higher education, economic competitiveness, innovation, and good governance that has challenged the established producers of numeric knowledge. Not only have the amount of international datasets multiplied, but the varieties of measurement—concerning conceptual and methodological decisions—have also increased. We find that the process of fragmentation has not effectively challenged the ideas behind the figures. Instead, the emerging indicator sets are woven into the fabric of the existing measurements as the figures that enter the field largely build on the existing ones without fundamentally challenging their ideational premises. This further embeds the use of numerical assessment in transnational governance.