Global governance has never seemed more necessary, and yet so under attack. Economies around the world are more dependent than ever on decisions made beyond their borders. International human rights norms have suffered attacks from multiple directions. The very habitability of the planet will be influenced by emissions guidelines that need collective effort and management.
At the same time, evidence of opposition to distant sources of external, international and ‘global’ authority is abundant. The United States is a prime example of a major democracy that once took a leadership role in international trade institutions but now challenges both multilateralism and rule-oriented dispute settlement. Critiques that international institutions, from the International Criminal Court to the International Monetary Fund, are imperialist have become increasingly resonant in much of the world. International institutions have been crucial in managing and deepening the processes of interdependence and accountability in the age of globalization. But the very relevance of global problems has made collective action both important and controversial. As Michael Zürn points out in his book, A Theory of Global Governance: Authority, Legitimacy and Contestation, legitimacy is crucial, but it is far from guaranteed.Footnote 1
Challenges to the legitimacy of international organizations come from rising powers who seek greater voice and different goals from those instantiated in the Liberal World Order, as well as from developing countries who resent accepting rules made by imperialist powers. Legitimacy challenges also come from within the liberal core, where populist opposition to internationalism has impacted politics and policies. Western disarray in NATO, the refusal of the US to support multilateralism, and growing civil society skepticism have all contributed to the legitimacy crisis of international institutions.
International organizations (IOs) have been struggling to respond to these challenges to their authority. Zürn's work points to several such efforts. Some IOs have embraced transparency, opened their decision-making to scrutiny, and invited broader participation. Such moves aim to strengthen a consensus among societal actors to support international institutional deepening. But traditional narratives inviting participation and touting transparency are not the most creative moves of modern IOs. Today, many are packaging and deploying information in new ways to achieve their traditional ends.
The dilemmas of modern global governance have made use of what we call global performance indicators (GPIs) increasingly attractive. Global performance indicators are defined as a named collection of rank-ordered data that purports to represent the past or projected performance of different units.Footnote 2 IOs have long produced data, but in the recent past they have promulgated overtly strategic rating and ranking systems that package and deploy information intentionally to advocate policy and to influence its implementation. Rather than double down on top-down regulatory commands, IOs have engaged in this form of information politics that governs through comparison. Here is the basic pattern: the organization creates a quantifiable (or quasi-quantifiable) index that compares the performance of multiple states within a region or more broadly; they make the index publicly and easily available, and publish it on a regular predictable schedule. The measures are typically explicitly normative, policy-focused, and are deployed to influence state-level outcomes. GPIs can take several forms, the most influential of which use numbers or grades to rate or rank state performance, compressing enormous variance into a simplified scale.Footnote 3 Ordinal categories are often used to produce (un)flattering peer group comparisons as well.
Zürn's book analyzes the context in which the turn to information politics of this kind makes sense for authoritative IOs facing challenges to their legitimacy. We build on his analysis by pointing to GPIs as a technology for threading the needle of the governance dilemma. The most clever organizations increasingly try to govern using information politics rather than old-style command and control. Zürn shows that IOs try to justify their hierarchical authority through various technocratic and participatory narratives; we add that they also shift to information politics that avoid the appearance of a directive, and are therefore more likely to fly beneath the radar of public contestation. We explain why assessing and ranking states’ performance is potentially impactful and provide an example from a beleaguered international financial institution, the World Bank. GPIs do not eliminate the contestation of authority, but they do help to camouflage that authority among the everyday pressures of politics, the media and the market.
The rise of indicators: an informational response to a governing dilemma
When IOs face challenges to their authority, they have incentives to develop tools that garner less resistance. GPIs are one such tool. According to a recent study, GPI growth has been nearly exponential. Approximately 20 GPIs were in use in the late 1990s; by the next decade, the number had roughly quadrupled, and in the next 15 years it more than tripled.Footnote 4 This proliferation responded to growing demands for policy-relevant performance data, facilitated by the fact that information was becoming ever easier to collect, process and disseminate.Footnote 5 Zürn's analysis suggests global performance assessments may have intensified because of the heightened politicization of the issues and institutions of global governance.
Why use indicators? IOs are attracted to them for several reasons. First, their deployment is a nearly imperceptible shift in the repertoire of traditional IO functions. IOs have collected, curated, and circulated data for decades. Information provision was one of the functions Robert Keohane cited in his seminal work explaining why international institutions exist in the first place.Footnote 6 One reason weak international institutions can enhance domestic accountability is by providing compliance data.Footnote 7 From the World Bank's World Development Indicators to the UN's Commodity Trade Statistics Database to the Food and Agricultural Organization's Forestry Database, collecting and organizing data has long been a core competency of IOs. Governance by assessment and ranking, that is, by GPIs, was a subtle process that could be considered an outgrowth of a long-accepted IO function. Soon it would seem natural that the World Bank would rank every country in the world from top to bottom on an Ease of Doing Business (EDB) Index,Footnote 8 and that the United Nations would do the same with respect to a Gender Inequality Index.Footnote 9 After all, what could be more legitimate than IOs producing information?
GPIs are not simply data in the neutral sense; they are deployed to set standards, establish policy agendas, and ultimately to influence legislation, regulations, behavior, and outcomes. Their labels are explicitly and increasingly normative. Their presentation invites audiences to ask, ‘how's my state doing?’ often inviting audiences browsing online interactively to shuffle various sub-indicators to view how one's state (and its competitors) perform according to various criteria. Comparisons are utterly integral to such exercises: the OECD's ‘Better Life Index’ invites viewers to ‘compare well-being across countries, based on 11 topics the OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of life.’Footnote 10 About two-thirds of active GPIs employ explicit top-to-bottom ranking systems, and over a third create clear normative categories or performance tiers, usually in addition to a ranking or rating.Footnote 11 These features render GPIs a potent tool for producing social control through the pressure of comparative information.
Experience suggests comparative indicators are a tried and true tool of influence. IOs can look to an impressive history of effective ranking systems used by private actors. Bond rating agencies are a notoriously powerful example.Footnote 12 But so are everyday raters such as US News and World Reports on colleges and universities,Footnote 13 and Consumer Reports on everything from toasters to automobiles.Footnote 14 In short, there are plenty of good examples that are highly effective in nudging households, investors and even states toward touted outcomes.
Perhaps the major reason IOs found rankings a convenient technology of governance is because GPIs address what Zürn suggests could be at the core of their legitimacy crisis: trying to be effective without being overly directive. Ranking systems do not work in quite the same top-down way as rules, laws, and directives, at least not to the naked eye. They are harnesses rather than commands. GPIs represent standards desired by the rater, and if the rater is salient and respected enough, social dynamics of competition, reputational concerns, and status obsessions take over.
Most attractive of all, the deployment of GPIs preserves, even enhances, perceptions of an IO's competence without raising legitimacy red flags. GPIs leverage expertise without issuing commands, and if they work as hoped, they burnish perceptions of competence on an issue without generating offense at external officiousness. They can deflect the criticisms about such pressure to third parties, such as investors or aid donors, who are at liberty to use the ranking to guide their resource decisions.Footnote 15 For these reasons, GPIs have proved an attractive technology of governance for IOs facing the legitimacy dilemma. They change the dynamics of ‘rules’ and ‘ruling.’ In short, GPIs are a handy technology to supplement and sometimes replace compliance politics with information politics.
Indicators as technologies of governance: why they work
But do GPIs really ‘work’ as effective technologies of governance? New research is emerging to answer this question, and, while it is limited to a few policy domains, we can advance some general if tentative responses.Footnote 16
Why should governments care about a simple ranking or rating? GPIs work through social pressure, which is applied by making peer comparisons. All social pressure operates through a change in the informational environment, targeting an entity's reputation or status. Sometimes officials (or bureaucrats, or citizens) care about reputation and status as an end in itself,Footnote 17 and sometimes they may be concerned about material consequences (foreign assistance, investment). When they know their state is being ranked, and that their performance will be splashed across the internet, they experience social pressure to conform to the criteria established by the rater. In anticipation of regularized rounds of rankings, they may even internalize the values of the rater, and eventually self-regulate. As Deitelhoff and Daase suggest, whether this form of pressure is ‘good’ or ‘benevolent’ is – to say the least – debatable. Our point here is that it can have very real effects on the targeted state through a status mechanism.Footnote 18
GPI creators including IOs seek to engage this concern with status and reputation by leveraging comparative information among peers.Footnote 19 Explicit comparisons create contexts in which judgments are formed and identities are established and reinforced.Footnote 20 They foster ‘commensuration,’ or ‘the comparison of different entities according to a common metric,’ as a way of making highly-simplified sense of the world.Footnote 21 Moreover, the media is particularly fond of reporting relative rankings; in numerous interviews GPI creators frankly acknowledge that they created such indexes precisely to attract media attention.Footnote 22
One source of GPI power is the credibility and authority of its creator. What makes some GPI creators more authoritative than others? The social psychology literature suggests that one source of legitimate authority is trust, which, in turn, develops out of a perception that an actor is fair, knowledgeable, and/or competent.Footnote 23 GPI creators also gain authority based on their assumed competence and expertise.Footnote 24 Network centrality may matter as well. Actors centrally located in a social and political network are better able to set agendasFootnote 25 and impact information flows,Footnote 26 which facilitates data collection and GPI dissemination.Footnote 27 It would be naïve to assert, of course, that leverage over resources plays no role. Direct control over resources and indirect influence over third parties that control resources are important reasons states pay attention to ratings and rankings as well, as Vincent Pouliot notes.Footnote 28 For these reasons – epistemic and quasi-coercive – major IOs are well-positioned to influence agendas, set status competition in motion, and judge performance better than just about any other corporate body.
The genius of ‘governing’ through GPIs is that IOs can set the criteria for performance, and then tap some very strong competitive dynamics. GPI information reverberates in domestic politics, especially when amplified by the press or social media.Footnote 29 Iterative assessment and ranking exercises incentivize government bureaucrats to take IOs’ expert advice directly into account in their policymaking.Footnote 30 GPIs activate transnational pressures and influence how third parties such as foreign investors, donors or other states respond to – or are anticipated to respond to – the ratings.Footnote 31 Such systems appear to operate nearly hands-free, by enabling improved domestic accountability and what might be thought of as market discipline. This is a highly attractive governing technology for IOs whose legitimacy is palpably on the wane.
Example: The World Bank and the Ease of Doing Business index
The World Bank is a telling case study. As Zürn points out, politicization surrounding the Bank's policies intensified over the course of the 1990s, culminating in the Battle in Seattle. The Bank had long tapped its expertise to justify loan conditionality, using a technocratic narrative – ‘we know development’ – to try and coerce better governance from its clients. For whatever reasons – including growing skepticism of interference of international financial institutions in traditional areas of state sovereigntyFootnote 32 – tools of economic leverage were seen as undesirable and/or ineffective ways to encourage such change. Instead the Bank intentionally chose a communication device that leverages the views of other actors to stoke pressure for regulatory change, even while distancing themselves from the possibility of policy failures. Rankings served that purpose: unlike strict forms of conditionality, they nudge performance in the international financial institutions’ favored direction without directly accepting responsibility for negative outcomes.Footnote 33
Publication of the Ease of Doing Business (EDB) index was not without controversy. Praised by western businesses, it met with skepticism by another major IO, the International Labor Organization,Footnote 34 and at least one major state, China.Footnote 35 The EDB includes such sub-indicators as a count of days it takes to start a business, days for a contract to be enforced in the courts, how many procedures are required to get a business license, and the ease of winding up a bankruptcy. On these and a few other criteria, the Bank ranks states from top to bottom.Footnote 36
Over the past decade, policy makers around the world have spoken and acted as though the EDB matters greatly.Footnote 37 Countries openly publicize their plans to undertake reforms. Georgia – whom some have criticized for gaming the system – announced concerted efforts to rise from 100th to the top 20 in two years.Footnote 38 National officials in Yemen,Footnote 39 Portugal,Footnote 40 Mauritius,Footnote 41 El Salvador,Footnote 42 and India have also highlighted EDB as motivating reforms. Some of these same countries have at varying times been among the most vociferous critics of international financial institutions. As time went on, researchers started to take these indicators as data – ground-level truth about the business environmentFootnote 43 – eliding further the distinction between ‘truth’ and social pressure that originally gave rise to their promulgation. As states began to jockey to ascend the rankings by implementing very specific EDB-consistent reforms,Footnote 44 it became increasingly apparent that the Bank had successfully harnessed competitive dynamics to secure its policy preferences.
New experimental evidence suggests that rankings as a strategic way of presenting performance information are impactful. Controlling for other kinds of economic information, relative EDB rankings influence investors’ assessments of where it is desirable to make investments. Similarly public attitudes on reform priorities have been shown to respond to information about poor EDB rankings vis-à-vis a salient competitor.Footnote 45 As the Bank itself has noted, ‘The main advantage of showing a single rank: it is easily understood by politicians, journalists, and development experts and therefore created pressure to reform. As in sports, once you start keeping score everyone wants to win.’Footnote 46 Conservative think tanks concur that there is something highly motivating about rankings: CATO's Director speculates that ‘Stripping the ordinal rankings and “reforming” the report's methodology would have the effect of completely destroying the report's credibility and usefulness as a policy tool.’Footnote 47 As if on cue, one informant in the investment consulting industry exclaimed (anonymously) that the EDB Index was one of the most effective things the World Bank had ever done.Footnote 48
The World Bank is far from the only IO to address the dilemma of governance facing a legitimacy deficit with the implicit governance of GPIs. This strategy is pervasive and growing. The European Institute uses the ‘European Gender Equality Index’ to incentivize attention to employment gaps by gender;Footnote 49 the World Intellectual Property Organization is ‘Energizing the World with Innovation’ using its ‘Global Innovation Index,’Footnote 50 and the International Telecommunications Union has deployed its Global Cyber Security Index to measure ‘the commitment of Member States to cybersecurity in order to raise awareness.’Footnote 51 Whether and to what extent these assessment regimes affect outcomes is a vibrant area of current research. Such schemes seem to be a pervasive response to the dilemma of governance in an age of growing politicization and diminishing IO legitimacy.
Conclusions
Michael Zürn's Theory of Global Governance: Authority, Legitimacy and Contestation, is an insightful diagnosis of the dilemmas faced by IOs as they try to deal with global problems on the one hand and growing politicization and resistance to their authority on the other. States and societies have certainly chafed under the delegation of important aspects of decision making to IOs. Rational institutions, theories of hands-tying and rational explanations for delegation appear to be blunt analytical tools in the face of recent revolts against the authority of IOs to govern.
Zürn's book is intriguing precisely because IOs face growing pressures to govern creatively. What they do matters, and the more it matters, the more resistance can be expected to their extranational exhortations and commands. If international legitimacy is in question, there are new incentives to expand the repertoire of governing responses. GPIs fit the bill: they create an impression of voluntary compliance with the exertion of minimal external enforcement. Research on the conditions under which GPIs are effective substitutes for (or complements to) traditional governance approaches helps to address the dilemma that Michael Zürn has exposed.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an initial draft. All mistakes remain our own.
