12. Measuring the Opposite of Corruption: The Evolution of Governance Indicators at Global Integrity

This chapter explains why Global Integrity, an independent non-profit organisation best known for its Global Integrity Report, started working on indicator-based integrity assessments, how its approach and methodology have evolved over the last decade and the linkages to broader developments in the field of governance measurement. In addition, the chapter lays out the reasons why Global Integrity has revised its organisational strategy and the resulting implications for on-going and future data projects. The authors—the former and current directors of research at Global Integrity—walk readers through three main stages in this evolution. The first stage involves Global Integrity’s origins and the gap that the Global Integrity Report came to fill in the governance measurement field in the 2000s. In the second stage, Global Integrity iteratively enhanced its methodology and refocused its aim, effectively shifting from a traditional expert assessment to a “fact-based expert analysis”, and expanded into new regional and sector assessments. In the third stage, Global Integrity’s growing concerns about the overall impact of its data resulted in the organisation re-evaluating its theory of change and revising some of its core assumptions about how governance reform happens and how measurements can contribute. This has resulted in an effort to better understand and support the use and usefulness of data at the country level and to rethink the role that external “best-practice” benchmarks play vis-à-vis locally defined “best-fit” benchmarks, re-orienting the organisation towards exploring how adaptive learning can contribute to supporting domestic stakeholders in driving governance reform.