Measuring corruption indicators and indices

This Working Paper is a background paper delivered to frame the workshop ‘Global Governance by Indicators: Measuring corruption and corruption indicators’ convened by the Global Governance Programme of the European University Institute in Florence on 17 and 18 October 2013. Successively it was developed further in EUI RSCAS WP 2014/37 - http://hdl.handle.net/1814/30582The development of more sophisticated corruption measures has been stimulated by consistent and compelling demands for more effective action against corruption. However, the production of these indicators has rarely been addressed as a ‘technique of governance’ (Davis et al., 2012), or an instrument of ‘governance without government’ (Rosenau & Czempiel, 1992). The first section (1) reviews the major existing measures of corruption, by focusing on different categories of indices and indicators. The second part (2) pays particular attention to the major ontological and methodological criticisms, constraints and pitfalls, connected with these indicators. The third part (3) presents a comparative analysis of two of the most widely used indicators of corruption: the World Bank’s Control of Corruption indicator (CC) and Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI). The fourth section (4) evaluates the policy implications embedded in the construction and employment of indicators, while the last part of the paper (5) concludes by summarizing the most important questions raised by this analysis

Regionalism and African agency : negotiating an Economic Partnership Agreement between the European Union and SADC-Minus

This article investigates the regional dynamics of African agency in the case of negotiations for an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the EU and a group of Southern African countries, known as SADC-Minus. I argue that these negotiations were shaped by a pattern of differentiated responses to the choice set on offer under the EPAs by SADC-Minus policymakers and by a series of strategic interactions and power plays between them. I offer two contributions to an emerging literature on the role of African agency in international politics. First, I argue for a clear separation between ontological claims about the structure-agency relationship and empirical questions about the preferences, strategies and influence of African actors. Second, I suggest that in order to understand the regional dynamics of African agency it is important to pay close attention to the diversity and contingency of African preferences and to the role of both power politics and rhetorical contestation in regional political processes

Building terror while fighting enemies : how the global war on terror deepened the crisis in Somalia

Published online: 21 Sep 2015Somalia has become a front in the US Global War on Terror (GWoT) because of the potential connection between terrorism and state fragility. While originally oriented towards ‘building states while fighting terror’, Enduring Freedom in Somalia obtained quite the opposite result of deepening the existing conflict. Why and how did the GWoT result in the controversial outcome of ‘building terror while fighting enemies’? This article argues that the GWoT sponsored in Somalia an isolationist strategy that encouraged the political polarisation and military radicalisation of the insurgency. To explore this argument, the article first analyses the structure of the intervention by focusing on the interests and strategies of the interveners. Then it evaluates the conditions under which the modality of intervention (through the use of diplomatic, economic and coercive measures) violated the conditions essential to resolving conflict

Measuring sustainability : benefits and pitfalls of fiscal sustainability indicators

This Working Paper is a background paper delivered to frame the workshop ‘Global Governance by Indicators : Sustainability and Sustainable Public Finances’ convened by the Global Governance Programme of the European University Institute in Florence on 10 and 11 April 2014. Successively it was developed further in EUI RSCAS WP 2014/78 http://hdl.handle.net/1814/31914The concept of sustainability emerged on the global governance agenda during the 1970s, when, the economic crisis put the spotlight on environmental and social risks associated with economic growth. Although much has been written about it, the literature on pillars, dimensions and measures of sustainability has developed quite independently from the discussions on the idea of sustainability as a set of interlinked and interdependent concentric thematic circles (that is its environmental, social, economic and institutional dimensions). Beginning with this conceptual debate, the present paper argues that indicators of fiscal sustainability are caught between demands of a solvency criterion and the principles of inter- and intra-generational equity. Bypassing their function as a mere representation of reality, these indicators have played a key role in de facto regulating the current fiscal crisis and in eclipsing the other dimensions of sustainability. To discuss this argument, the paper’s first section explores the literature on sustainability indicators and composite indices of sustainable development. Its second part focuses on indicators of fiscal sustainability evaluating concepts, measures and demands. The third part gives insight into two measures, the United Nations’ (UN) Debt to GNI ratio and the European Union’s (EU) fiscal sustainability gap indicators. The fourth part concludes by summarising conceptual, normative and ontological questions

Conclusions : knowing and governing

Measuring is a way of doing politics. Scholars and practitioners, who contributed to this Handbook, agreed that measuring mattered because of its instrumentality in governing. They however came to contrasting conclusions about the way forward and the volume therefore reflected this variety of discordant interpretations. Some contributions contested the effectiveness of the existing indicator culture and addressed methodological solutions inspired by standards of scientific objectivity, like a focus on performance indicators or institutional quality dimensions, improved techniques, internal validity, and reliability. Others were critical about the contemporary indicator culture because of normative premises, as well as intended and unintended consequences, ranging from the creation of distorted ontologies of the real, and the instrumental, conceptual hybridity in serving the pervasiveness of the neo-liberal paradigm of governance and the simplification of social complexity, over the external interference in the legitimacy of domestic policy decision-making, to the dissemination of corporate governance mechanisms. Many contributors proposed solutions that in their view better suited the decentralisation of governance. Their chapters did not demand pure mechanical objectivity but rather a better transformation of politics into metrics through locally embedded, disaggregated, micro-level, country-specific data and systems of knowledge creation

Of numbers and narratives : indicators in global governance and the rise of a reflexive indicator culture

There is a pervasive sense in which we seem to be living under a new avalanche of numbers, and in particular an avalanche of indicators beyond the state and purporting to create knowledge on a global scale. As much as our indicator culture engenders a “faith in numbers”, the very expansion of the power of numbers and their role in (global) governance over the last 20 years has brought with it a heightened sense that quantification, indicators, and rankings are a way of doing politics that must be engaged with from within and without the specific disciplinary knowledge (such as statistics and econometrics) that underwrite their claims to objectivity. The chapters collected in this Handbook aim to capture the contemporary indicator culture, with all its discordant and contrasting orientations. The present introductory chapter considers three main dimensions. First, no chapter in the Handbook adopts a naively metrological understanding of indicators as simply “measuring” reality. Second, the normativity of measurement is a consistent theme of the contributions by both scholars and practitioners. Third, despite their popularity and seeming capacity to shape debates, the power of indicators remains highly contextual and dependent on how they are enrolled in particular, situated, networks of actors and influence

Representing, reducing or removing complexity : indicators of sustainability and fiscal sustainability

This Working Paper is the elaboration of the discussion emerged during the workshop ‘Global Governance by Indicators : Sustainability and Sustainable Public Finances’ convened by the Global Governance Programme of the European University Institute in Florence on 10 and 11 April 2014. It is based on the workshop's background paper published as EUI RSCAS WP 2014/77 available at: http://hdl.handle.net/1814/31913During the last two decades numerous indicators measuring sustainability and its different dimensions have been created. The 2007 economic crisis led to increased scrutiny of public sector fiscal imbalances, and efforts to create more sophisticated measures of fiscal sustainability. The literature on this recent formulation and use of sustainability indicators is broad and contested. It however largely tends to focus on fiscal components, while wider meanings of sustainability are accounted for to a lesser degree. This working paper examines the conceptual and empirical questions relating to the production of indicators of sustainability, both in the sense of fiscal sustainability and sustainable development. It also discusses the uses of sustainability indicators

Interdisciplinary perspectives on producing, using and debating corruption indicators

This Working Paper is the elaboration of discussion emerged during the workshop ‘Global Governance by Indicators: Measuring corruption and corruption indicators’ convened by the Global Governance Programme of the European University Institute in Florence on 17 and 18 October 2013. It is based on the workshop's background paper published as EUI RSCAS WP 2014/13 http://hdl.handle.net/1814/29872While, in the last decades, the proliferation of corruption indicators has stimulated an increasing sophistication of both data collection and management, academics and policy-makers have been confronted with significant challenges and criticisms over their efforts to elaborate anti-corruption strategies. Both theoretical and methodological issues related to the use of corruption indicators highlight the need to better consider the narrative emerging from the use of numbers; in particular by evaluating both policy context and implications involved in the construction of corruption through governance indicators. The present working paper promotes the idea of approaching corruption indicators from a broader multidisciplinary and multifocal perspective. It addressed three core dimensions of the analysis of key governance indicators: the construction of corruption indicators and their use as well as the discourse about them

Measuring governance to achieve sustainable development : promises and challenges

Published Online: 20 November 202