(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.