Bad science: International organizations and the indirect power of global benchmarking.
Bad science: International organizations and the indirect power of global benchmarking.
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DOI：
10.1177/1354066117719320
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发表时间：
2018-09
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Kranke M
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Broome A;Homolar A;Kranke M
生产被广泛认为是合法的跨国知识是国际组织影响力的一个主要来源。为了加强其专家地位，国际组织越来越多地制定全球基准，以衡量各国在一系列问题领域的业绩。本文通过考察两个国际组织试图通过比较指标塑造世界的突出案例来说明国际组织基准是世界政治中间接权力的重要来源：（1）世界银行-国际金融公司的营商便利度排名;（2）经济合作与发展组织的外国直接投资监管限制指数。我们认为，由于制定这些基准的国际组织的专门知识而赋予这些基准的合法性是很成问题的，原因有二。首先，这两个基准过于简化了对国家相对表现的评估，将从特定跨国范式中得出的有争议的政治价值观歪曲为经验事实。第二，它们在国际竞技场上确立了国家表现的“理想”和“病态”类型之间的任意划分，这（重新）产生了国家之间的社会等级。我们认为，国际组织使用基准来指导政治行为者如何理解最佳做法，倡导政策变革和归因于政治责任的方式构成了“坏科学”。扩展研究范式维护的过程和国际组织作为教师的规范或法官的规范遵守的影响力，我们展示了如何间接的权力，国际组织行使相对国家表现的评估者，通过基准可以是非常重要的国家的政策优先事项的定义。
The production of transnational knowledge that is widely recognized as legitimate is a major source of influence for international organizations. To reinforce their expert status, international organizations increasingly produce global benchmarks that measure national performance across a range of issue areas. This article illustrates how international organization benchmarking is a significant source of indirect power in world politics by examining two prominent cases in which international organizations 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 Co-operation and Development FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness Index. We argue that the legitimacy attached to these benchmarks because of the expertise of the international organizations 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 international organizations 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 international organizations as teachers of norms or judges of norm compliance, we show how the indirect power that international organizations exercise as evaluators of relative national performance through benchmarking can be highly consequential for the definition of states’ policy priorities.
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