What can ‘benchmarking’ offer the open method of co-ordination?

Abstract

Benchmarking offers actors a means of resolving the horizontal and vertical collective action problems that often bedevil the development and implementation of decision-making. It has assumed a vital role in the EU’s ‘open method of co-ordination’ with its focus on the identification and dissemination of ‘best practice’ through mutual learning and peer review, offering new solutions for policy management in an increasingly complex, diverse and uncertain environment. Yet the evolution of benchmarking from management tool to regulatory instrument is also problematic, and not just because it remains conceptually ambiguous and technically difficult to effect in practice. More fundamentally, the mechanisms of control that underpin benchmarking in large companies are generally unavailable to public policy-makers. As a result, benchmarking must be looser at EU level, and perhaps ultimately viewed as a complementary rather than an alternative form of regulation.

Keywords:

• Benchmarking
• EU regulation
• open method of co-ordination

Notes

Further details are available at the official website of the Benchmarking Co- Ordination Office (BCO), <www.benchmarking-in-europe.com> launched in October 1998 by the Enterprise Directorate-General of the European Commission, in conjunction with the BCO.

One of us attended a recent seminar which was attended by a senior official of the UK Treasury, who spoke from personal experience about what it felt like to be involved in EU-level benchmarking with peer group review. He said that, like many people, he had been somewhat scornful about ‘naming and shaming’ as a method of enforcement. Having been personally exposed to the process, however, he could vouch for its impact. It was not at all a comfortable position, he pointed out, for senior officials and ministers of governments to be put in the dock in such an explicit way.

http://europa.eu.int/comm/employment_social/news/2003/apr/newees_en.html