The Quiet Power of Indicators

Using a power-knowledge framework, this volume critically investigates how major global indicators of legal governance are produced, disseminated and used, and to what effect. Original case studies include Freedom House's Freedom in the World indicator, the Global Reporting Initiative's structure for measuring and reporting on corporate social responsibility, the World Justice Project's measurement of the rule of law, the World Bank's Doing Business index, the World Bank-supported Worldwide Governance Indicators, the World Bank's Country Performance Institutional Assessment (CPIA), and the Transparency International Corruption (Perceptions) index. Also examined is the use of performance indicators by the European Union for accession countries and by the US Millennium Challenge Corporation in allocating US aid funds.
This highly accessible book investigates the rankings that increasingly influence perceptions of countries' governance and civil rights.
Sally Engle Merry is Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University. She is the author and editor of nine books, including the J. Willard Hurst Prize-winning Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law (2000). Her most recent book is Governance by Indicators (2012, co-edited with Kevin Davis, Angelina Fisher and Benedict Kingsbury).
Kevin E. Davis is Beller Family Professor of Business Law and Vice Dean at New York University School of Law. He has written extensively about anti-corruption law as well as the relationship between law and economic development in such journals as the American Journal of Comparative Law, the Law and Society Review, and the New York University Law Review.
Benedict Kingsbury is Murry and Ida Becker Professor of Law and director of the Institute for International Law and Justice at New York University School of Law. In addition to being co-Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International Law he is the editor and co-editor of over fifteen books, including International Financial Institutions and Global Legal Governance (2011).