Shows how global ratings and rankings shape political agendas and influence states' behavior, reframing how we think about power.

This highly accessible book investigates the rankings that increasingly influence perceptions of countries' governance and civil rights.

Indicators and rankings are widely used by governments and organisations to assess the effectiveness, efficiency, and success of policy decisions. This book evaluates the creation of indicators, their impact on policy decisions, and the implications of their use.

Breathtaking in its simplicity and profound in its impact, Key Performance Indicators (KPI) distills the balanced scorecard process into twelve logical steps, equipping users with an implementation resource kit that includes questionnaires, worksheets, workshop outlines, and a list of over 500 performance measures. Author David Parmenter provides you with everything you need to master and implement a KPI-driven strategy.

The twenty-first century has seen a further dramatic increase in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life after its explosion in the 1980s. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for public debate than qualitative knowledge, thus producing more democratic decision-making. However, we know little about the social processes through which this knowledge is constituted nor its effects. Understanding how such numeric knowledge is produced and used is increasingly important as proliferating technologies of quantification alter modes of knowing in subtle and often unrecognized ways. This book explores the implications of the global multiplication of indicators as a specific technology of numeric knowledge production used in governance.

What is international law, and how does it work? This book argues that our answers to these fundamental questions are shaped by a variety of social cognition and knowledge production processes. These processes act as invisible frames, through which we understand international law. To better conceive the frames within which international law moves and performs, we must understand how psychological and socio-cultural factors affect decision-making in an international legal process. This includes identifying the groups of people and institutions that shape and alter the prevailing discourse in international law, and unearthing the hidden meaning of the various mythologies that populate and influence our normative world. With chapters from leading experts in the discipline, employing insights from sociology, psychology, and behavioural science, this book investigates the mechanisms that allow us to apprehend and intellectually represent the social practice of international law. It unveils the hidden or unnoticed processes by which our understanding of international law is formed, and helps readers to unlearn some of the presuppositions that inform our largely unquestioned beliefs about international law.

The Oxford Handbook of International Law and Development is a unique overview of the field of international law and development, examining how normative beliefs and assumptions around development are instantiated in law, and critically examining disciplinary frameworks, competing agendas, legal actors and institutions, and alternative futures.