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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• measuring
• ranking
• indicators
• governance
• expertise
• World Bank
• OECD

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Thomas Pfister, Anna Horvath and our anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this article. Also, we would like to thank Max Eklund and Mark Waller for their assistance with editing and proofing the manuscript. Our work has received funding from Academy of Finland, Helsinki University Network for Higher Education and Innovation Research, and Helsinki University Network for European Studies.

Notes

1. Desrosières's (1998, 9) notion of numerical “objectification” is a fitting way of describing the processes in which social scientific quantification construct “objective phenomena”.

2. Gieryn (1999, 1) defines “epistemic authority” as “the legitimate power to define, describe, and explain bounded domains of reality”. While his analysis focuses on the modern meta-narrative – “science” – we seek to identify epistemic authority with bounded domains of expertise that, admittedly, draw much of their legitimacy from “scientific” conduct and contact.

3. Apparently, the World Bank – at the time presided by James Wolfensohn – used a somewhat corresponding strategy in attempting to redefine the “[previously unspeakable] ‘C’ word” as something non-political in order to make anti-corruption work fit its “neutrality” upholding statutes (Ivanov 2007, cited in Gephart 2009, 11).

4. World Wide Governance Indicators, http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.asp

5. Laura Langbein and Stephen Knack (2008) argue that “the six indexes do not discriminate usefully among different aspects of governance” and that they merely reflect the quality of governance more generally.

6. Rule of law, http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/pdf/rl.pdf

7. While it is reasonable to subscribe to the notion that corruption should be an important factor in allocating aid, it is important to emphasize that a simple “in-or-out” rule runs the risk of misclassifying some countries precisely because margins of error are not trivial … For the majority of countries there is a non-trivial probability that they could be mistakenly classified in the bottom half of the sample (Kaufmann et al. 2003, 25–26).

8. This was seen to be particularly relevant regarding trust in government as a diagnostic, where the OECD saw the institutions already making relevant surveys being prepared to deliberate collaboration (OECD 2006a, 33).