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.

The latest global financial crisis has allowed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) a spectacular comeback. But despite its notorious reputation as a staunch advocate of restrictive economic policies, the Fund has displayed less preference for austerity in recent crisis lending. Though widely welcomed as overdue, the IMF's shift away from what John Williamson coined the 'Washington Consensus' was met with resistance from the European Union (EU) where it concerned Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. The situation of hard-hit Hungary, Latvia, and Romania propelled unprecedented cooperation between the IMF and the EU, in which the EU has very actively promoted orthodox measures in return for loans. We argue that this represents a European rescue of the Washington Consensus. The case of Latvia is paradigmatic for the profound disagreements between an austeritydemanding EU and a less austere IMF. The IMF's stance contradicts conventional wisdom about the organization as the guardian of economic orthodoxy. To solve this puzzle, we shed light on three complementary factors of (non)learning that have shaped the EU's relations vis-à-vis CEE borrowing countries in comparison to the IMF's: (1) a disadvantageous institutional setting; (2) vociferous creditor coalitions; (3) the precarious eurozone project.

This article explores how systemic risk has been governed at the international level after the financial crisis. While macroprudential ideas have been widely embraced, the policy instruments used to implement them have typically revolved more narrowly around the monitoring of risk posed by discrete 'systemically important' entities. This operational focus on individual entities sidelines the more radical implications of macroprudential theory regarding fallacies of composition, fundamental uncertainty and the public control of finance. We explain this tension using a performative understanding of risk as a socio-technical construction, and illustrate its underlying dynamics through case studies of systemic risk governance at the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF or Fund). Drawing on official reports, consultation documents and archival sources, we argue that the FSB's and IMF's translations of systemic risk into a measurable and attributable object have undermined the transformative potential of the macroprudential agenda. The two cases illustrate how practices of quantification can make systemic risk seemingly more governable but ultimately more elusive.

Scholars of global governance tend to agree that international organizations (IOs) enjoy expert authority because they provide applicable specialist knowledge for policymaking. This view implies that IOs' expert status rests more on the contents than the presentation of their knowledge. Integrating the sociological concept of 'boundary work' into a Goffmanian symbolic-dramaturgical perspective, this article articulates a competing interpretation that recovers the relational and performative aspects of expert authority. I argue that, in settings where spheres of authority overlap, boundary work by IOs serves two loosely coupled functions: demarcation and cooperation. While IOs demarcate their jurisdictions on the 'frontstage' to craft perceptions of exclusive expertise, they closely cooperate on the 'backstage' to mitigate internal resource constraints. I illustrate this argument by examining the relationship between the International Monetary Fund (IMF or Fund) and the World Bank (or Bank) around the joint Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP). Based on elite interviews and relevant documents, the analysis shows that the IMF's frontstage boundary work entailed promoting FSAP reforms and launching a new surveillance initiative without the World Bank. Yet while demarcation can augment an IO's expertise, it risks poisoning inter-organizational relationships.