Abstract. Benchmarking practices have rapidly diffused throughout the globe in recent years. This can be traced to their popularity amongst non-state actors, such as civil society organisations and corporate actors, as well as states and international organisations (IOs). Benchmarks serve to both 'neutralise' and 'universalise' a range of overlapping normative values and agendas, including freedom of speech, democracy, human development, environmental protection, poverty alleviation, 'modern' statehood, and 'free' markets. The proliferation of global benchmarks in these key areas amounts to a comprehensive normative vision regarding what various types of transnational actors should look like, what they should value, and how they should behave. While individual benchmarks routinely differ in terms of scope and application, they all share a common foundation, with normative values and agendas being translated into numerical representations through simplification and extrapolation, commensuration, reification, and symbolic judgements. We argue that the power of benchmarks chiefly stems from their capacity to create the appearance of authoritative expertise on the basis of forms of quantification and numerical representation. This politics of numbers paves the way for the exercise of various forms of indirect power, or 'governance at a distance', for the purposes of either status quo legitimation or political reform.

International organisations (IOs) often serve as the 'engine room' of ideas for structural reforms at the national level, but how do IOs construct cognitive authority over the forms, processes, and prescriptions for institutional change in their member states? Exploring the analytic institutions created by international organisations provides insights into how they make their member states 'legible', and how greater legibility enables them to construct cognitive authority in specific policy areas which in turn enhances their capacity to influence changes in national frameworks for economic and social governance. By 'seeing like an international organisation' we can increase our understanding of the cognitive and organisational environment that guides an IO's actions and informs its policy advice to states, which enables a more comprehensive picture of how the everyday business of global governance works in practice. Instead of 'black boxing' international organisations, the contributors to this special issue demonstrate how studying IOs from the inside-out expands both our understanding of the policy dialogue between IOs and their member states, as well as how IOs and states learn from each other over time. KeywordsInternational organisations, cognitive authority, global economic governance, economic constructivism How do international organisations (IOs) construct cognitive authority over the forms, process, and prescriptions for institutional change in their member states? This special issue examines this complex question through concentrating on the analytic institutions that shape how IOs 'see' the social environments in which they seek to effect economic reforms and embed particular intellectual frameworks as commonsense solutions to a state's policy problems. The analytic processes through which IOs 'see' different societies and attempt to make them 'legible' through common systems of measurement and benchmarking standards constitute an indirect exercise of political power over distinct social, economic, and political systems, which rests upon the cognitive authority to measure, analyse, and prescribe institutional changes for states that is constructed by -and housed within -IOs themselves. While the processes through which IOs attempt to construct cognitive authority usually operate in the background -and tend to attract

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.

International organizations (IOs) such as the International Monetary Fund and the WorldBank are assumed to rely on 'sympathetic interlocutors' at the national level to drive through economic reforms that conform to global policy norms. In this article we answer the following question: how do sympathetic interlocutors for IOs emerge in the first place? We address this question by examining how IOs engage in teaching norms to national officials via transnational policy training in order to increase the number of domestic reformers who are sympathetic to their prescriptions for policy change. We provide a conceptual framework for understanding how IOs seek to use their own cognitive authority to foster 'diagnostic coordination' across technocratic economic policy communities. This encourages officials to adapt to a common policy language and delimits the policy space within which they identify and propose solutions to economic problems.

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