In the last two decades, international organisations have been designing, establishing, and promoting transnational benchmarks for evaluating the quality of governance. Differently from the classic measures of macroeconomics and policy outcome, this new generation of indicators attempts to assess the quality of input, processes, institutions, and output. The World Bank and the OECD have been competing in devising and legitimising indexes across policy areas, such as regulatory reform, education, and health. The explosion of policy indexes has been researched by scholars interested in globalisation and policy interdependency, exploring the role of the international organisations as teachers of norms or coercers. Others have focused on the technical quality of measures and indicators. An analysis of the methodological and technical aspects of policy indicators and benchmarks within the politics of and competition among international organisations is still missing. Focusing on regulatory reform and environmental policy, two policies characterised by the presence of several transnational benchmark systems, this paper attempts to fill this gap. Its aim is two-fold. Firstly, we show the rationales behind the emergence and explosion of the multi-faceted transnational evaluation system. The supply and demand of quality of policy indicators are analysed within a policy innovation diffusion framework. Secondly, we present empirical findings on the extent and the patterns of national governments’ utilisation of these governance indexes. Analysing the impact of international organisations’ benchmarks on several OECD countries, we assess the extent of knowledge diffusion across national policy networks.
