<figure><img src="image_19.png" /></figure>

**Fig. 7.6** Photographs of the direct confrontation with the headquarters company directors. (a) (top photograph; right of the table, from left to right): Karlo (NGO Sawit Watch), Bondan (Sawit Watch), Yanti (Batu Ampar village chief), Nauli (NGO Wahli Jambi); (b) (bottom left): GAR (Singapore) director of communication; (c) (centre): Karlo; (d) (bottom right): Yanti (*Source* Photographs by Laurent Thévenot)

Yanti dressed up for the occasion and wearing the hijab (Fig. 7.6d, in contrast with her informal clothing and cap she had on in the field, see Fig. 7.5b).

Karlo (NGO Sawit Watch):

The Batu Ampar villagers have worked hard to resolve the boundary issue during the past year. I present documents describing the effort made to
resolve the boundary issue. [...] we brought this up to RSPO to try and pester the company to implement the government decision so that Batu Ampar can access its lands.

**Yanti (chief of the village):**

Our last meeting was stuck on boundary issues. In July this was resolved at the government level in favour of Batu Ampar, and I have requested KDA to implement this resolution and allow the Batu Ampar villagers to work the land. The company has not given a satisfactory answer. [...]

**Agun (mediator from Tropical Forest Trust, paid by GAR):**

The Bupati [head of district] office held the SK [decision] and demanded payment. TFT wouldn't engage with this since it involves bribery and we don't know how the SK [decision] finally got issued. [...]

**Nauli (NGO Wahli, local branch in Jambi):**

Can't KDA give evidence of progress that can be presented to the Batu Ampar community? Without progress Yanti's efforts may lose community support, so give us something to show. [...]

**Karlo:**

I don't quite understand the notion of the Bupati asking money for the SK. Does this have anything to do with the Batu Ampar request for funds for boundary mapping? [...]

**Yanti:**

I'd like to mention that I've borrowed money to perform the mapping and boundary delineation work.

**Mediator:**

Well, TFT doesn't want to know about bribery.

**Yanti:**

We're not talking about bribes! It's about the costs of the mapping work.

**Yanti (to the director of this subsidiary Company KDA):**

Would you dare to walk into the disputed area, since you said you're a Jambinese?

**Nasir:**

I would as a Jambinese, but that's not the problem.

*Some Lessons Learnt on the “Judicial” Legitimacy of Governing by Certification Standards*

In this third part dedicated to the ways standard enforcement is put to a reality test, we followed three general procedures for monitoring compliance with the standard and dealing with disputes about it, which have counterparts in the judicial system (complaint, judgement), its periphery
(mediation) and other private or public government processes (audit). The three differ due to the formatting of the world they demand to make it calculable, and the disposition of the participants they involve, so that all beings “qualify” for the test and can be taken into account in the judgement. Audit is carried out in the company, most often on the basis of documents, and is therefore the most formal test and the farthest from a direct confrontation between protagonists. The Dispute Resolution process requires of the plaintiffs hard formatting work for the complaint to be admissible. Judgement includes a process of questioning the parties but not the adversarial confrontation organized by the judicial system. Finally, the mediation test is the least formal of the three. The parties in conflict are brought together face-to-face to display their disagreement on their conformity to the standard. It allows them to become involved in *regimes of engagement* that deviate from the format of the plan and the objective set out by the standard. As observed more generally in mediation (Cardoso de Oliviera, 2005), the openness to familiar engagement that this face-to-face relation makes possible is conducive to expressions of suffering or humiliation that complainants consider to be lost in the judicial process that sacrifices them in favour of qualified facts.

In order for the test to have public legitimacy, the bodies that guarantee the procedure should be impartial: auditors, RSPO members issuing a judgement, or mediators. In the three types of tests we examined, this impartiality is highly questionable. Such procedural faults reveal the imbalance of power between parties, which the *liberal* grammar and the *multi-stakeholder* matrix claim to overcome to the benefit of the juxtaposition of “stakes” in a horizontal dialogue around a “roundtable”. In the first test, failure comes from the financing of audits by companies with resulting dependency and conflicts of interests. In the second test, a fault results from the choice among the “board” of the “judges” who rule on dispute resolutions, which was recently remedied. In the third test, the flaw ensues from the financing of the mediator by the company that is one of the parties in conflict. The consequences of this flaw are made visible in the meeting above when the mediator himself, and not one of the parties, undertook to disqualify the new major piece of evidence provided by the village chief: the delimitation of the village territory ratified by the local administrative authority, which contradicts the map produced by the company. This disqualification on grounds of “bribery”, without any supporting evidence, is an interference by the mediator to which the village chief, Yanti, replied firmly. As a young Muslim nurse, she
demonstrated her ability to shift the regime of engagement with great versatility. Although adjusted by her formal dressing and composure to a public space, she was also able, in the presence of managers, to adopt familiar expressiveness and gestures (Fig. 7.6d) of indignation that we also observed on Arifin (Fig. 7.3b).

In the continuation of this move towards familiarity, she challenged the local company's manager to come on site. The request to "come on site", which contrasts most radically with the detachment of the judge-ment from the contextual situation, and even more with abstraction through numbers, is often expressed by critics to demonstrate that the chain of transformation of their testimony has, in the end, led to the sacrifice of what was most important to them and affected or threatened (Richard-Ferroudji, 2011; Thévenot et al., 2000; Thévenot, 2019a).

Unlike the closure of the judicial system, which is due to its heavy normative equipment, jurisprudence accumulated over time and with support from its professional bodies, the most recent RSPO system is relatively more open to varied modes of normativity. They are either explicitly transferred into the standard (production methods, national and international law, indigenous peoples' rights, customary law, etc.) or advanced via criticism and interventions by legitimate *stakeholders*. The diversity of these stakeholders allows disputes to question the lack—or reduction—of certain modes of normativity even if they eventually undergo a significant transformation to enter the standard.²⁸ The most vulnerable actors, with the support of an architecture of NGOs that fit the stakeholders' various engagement formats, from local proximity to dealings with international multinationals, seek compromises, through inquiry and critical devices, with such governing through objectives whose limitation they are aware of. With one foot in and one foot out, they also engage in other modes of attesting, protesting and contesting, such as unionization or street demonstration in relation to the 2013 RSPO convention.

## DISCUSSION OF THE CERTIFIED OBJECTIVITY SOUGHT BY A “STANDARDIZING LIBERALISM”: POWER-KNOWLEDGE AND THE ENLARGED ANALYSIS OF OPPRESSION AND CRITICISM

Quantification studies are part of research on objectivity which historians of science nurtured (Daston & Galison, 2007; Porter, 1995). The social
sciences have a long tradition of critical deconstruction of claims to objectivity, fostered by social constructivism, ANT (Actor-Network Theory) and STS (Science and Technology Studies). Just as STS authors concerned with the coordination power of “regulatory objectivity” (Cambrosio et al., 2009), our research agenda adopts a pragmatist approach to the study of the politics of quantification. More precisely, it investigates the relations between quantified objectivity and modes of governing that make the world calculable. In contrast to a range of politics that govern by quantifying the individuals themselves (Thévenot, 2011a, 2019b), be they state policies based on survey statistics, or organizational ones that digitally track individuals, or the quantified “social credit” which Tong Lam introduces in this volume and which combines the central control of the Chinese state with the data mining of digital individual tracks, or even the “quantified self” movement that Uwe Vormbusch examines in this volume, the politics considered in this chapter govern human beings indirectly through objects, via the transnational voluntary certification of market goods. In spite of its material basis and “private” character, this form of government takes on values that are generally under the responsibility of the “public” government of people based on the rule of law. As pointed out by Andrei Guter-Sandu and Andrea Mennicken in their contribution to this volume, “the boundaries between the public and private are blurred and/or reworked”. The *liberal* grammar that stays in the background of these new modes of governing indeed facilitates the link with *market* coordination and contributes to this blurring. Yet, research attention should be given to the consolidation of this link by the standardization of goods—a process which is, in itself, neither *liberal*, nor implicated in *market* competition. Rather it evolved into a new kind of “standardizing liberalism” (Thévenot, 1997) which has expanded on a world scale.

Marc Breviglieri analysed at large this expansion in the domain of “the guaranteed city” (Breviglieri, 2018), showing the formatting it brings about in the environment that stands close to a person’s singular intimacy—the habitat—and supports the construction of commonality built on cohabitation. The array of labels, accreditations and certifications that guarantee a “smart city”, “inclusive city”, “global active city”, “what works cities”, etc., transforms what Breviglieri calls the “architectures of usages” which, by contrast, rely on familiarized dependencies between inhabitants and the spaces they dwell in. This transformation
produces certified options that allow the choice of opting liberal individuals, and market coordination as well. In her comprehensive research on “halal” certification (Bergeaud-Blackler & Kokoszka, 2017; Bergeaud-Blackler et al., 2016), Florence Bergeaud-Blackler demonstrated that the investments in forms and measurement conventions required by this standardization led to a *dispositif* that combines *inspiration, market* and *industrial* orders of worth to reach a stabilized compromise and create a certifiable halal quality of goods and services. She showed the effect of this reduction of faith to a measurable and certifiable quality: it reinforces, on a large scale and insidiously via the *market*, a literalist and fundamentalist conception of religion (see also Stavo-Debauge, 2018).

The European government of education (see also Corine Eyraud's contribution in this volume), health, social work and employment—i.e. core policies of the former welfare state—also display this process of “standardizing liberalism”. What are the similarities and differences with the certification we studied? Although standards are central (Landri, 2016; Normand, 2016a; Timmermans & Berg, 2003; Normand, 2010), as well as good practices (Normand & Derouet, 2016) in these post-welfare policies, both are grounded in “politics of evidence” (Normand, 2016b, 2020) which do not have the same role in the RSPO certification standard. Decision-making processes also diverge, since the European policies combine elements of state legal systems with experts from influential transnational think-tanks and private firms, all of them being connected in networks through which normative and evaluative tools “travel” (Lawn, 2013). Yet, in spite of the links with representative democracy, this combination does not appear to be much more favourable to critical questioning (Bruno, 2016) than the RSPO standard.

Research on these different policies, and “standardizing liberalism” more generally, provides an important meeting place for the two research approaches on standardization and quantification brought together in this volume (see also Hansen, 2016, 2017; Normand, 2016a). This volume enables a dialogue between two long-standing research agendas on quantification, which until hitherto, with some notable exceptions, particularly more recently, have not interacted that much: Foucault inspired studies of quantification, on the one hand, and French works on the “Economie des conventions”, modes of justification and orders of worth, on the other hand. The dialogue engendered here helps elucidate convergences and divergences between these approaches.²⁹
The first point of convergence results from the significance of words-
things connections already unfolded in Foucault’s *Les mots et les choses*
(Foucault, 1966), before STS and ANT paid attention to materiality.
Being concerned with the notion of “qualification” in our analysis, these
became also important in Foucault oriented studies of quantification
which extended from accounting to material arrangements, such as those
studied in the “spatial reordering of the manufacture” by Peter Miller and
Ted O’Leary (1994); Foucault’s dispositif being a shared inspiration for
both.

In contiguity with the previous connection through Foucault’s micro-
power of dispositifs, the power-knowledge connection (Foucault, 1985
[1984], 1995 [1975]) is a second central issue in both research
streams, although grasped differently. In Foucault inspired governmen-
tality studies, the “administering of lives” (Mennicken & Miller, 2014)
and managing at a distance through the “conduct of conduct” are key
issues. In the other approach, in-forming, trans-forming and formatting
through invested conventional forms are central operations, because they
sustain coordination power under uncertainty.

A third shared concern—clearly visible in this chapter—is the move
beyond the state, but also beyond the “neoliberal” as an all-encompassing
notion. But also here the main categories used to achieve this move differ.
Compared to the Foucauldian historical-genealogical approach aimed at
studying and unpacking regimes of political rationality, the “Economie
des conventions” approach is interested in the critical pluralism of modes
of evaluation constituted by conventions, orders of worth and valued
regimes of engagements. While “programmes” (of governing) are the
main empirical objects in the Foucauldian tradition to scrutinize manage-
ment reforms, breaking down policies and politics into a variety of valued
modes of coordination is at stake in the other tradition, with special atten-
tion given to the tensions between most public conventions and most
personally convenient modes of engaging, and the chain of transformation
involved when shifting from familiar attachments to public qualifications
(Nielsen, 2015).

Shared concern and dialogue might intensify on research objects that
bring to light changes in governmentality and modes of governing in
response to former waves of criticism. Mennicken and Miller³⁰ noted
that research on modes of “exercising voice” is all the more needed
today, as for instance the language of NHS health policy guidelines
they study shifted from an earlier focus on “satisfaction”, to “choice”
and now towards “voice”, with even attention paid to “formal and informal knowledge (‘soft intelligence’)” and “relationship knowledge”. In their contribution on quantification in the English Prison Service in this volume, Guter-Sandu and Mennicken also come to take into account a diversity of values that quantification gives room to, including the rise of measures of decency in response to former criticisms.

Accounting for differing voices, their evaluative orientations, the formats of the evidence that qualifies for claims according to grammars of commonality, are a main strength of the extended Convention Theory research programme. Following the processes of attesting, protesting and contesting brought new insights into politics, the ways people take part in the polity and express a differing voice (Luhtakallio & Thévenot, 2018). Many contributors to this volume share a concern for critical voices and what quantification does to them. They follow the process of investigation, construction of the categories and the information used to quantify and govern, considering both structural domination and the participation of the persons in the organization and criticism of this domination, with a possible enhancement of citizens’ capabilities (De Leonardis et al., 2012). Fostering on this point the dialogue between the two research agendas nurtured by this volume, Vormbusch recalls in his chapter that, while the sociology of critique has been criticized for overlooking the historically specific restrictions limiting the very possibility for critique, Foucault has been accused of neglecting human agency. Regarding self-quantifying practices as “an investigative praxis [...] *without* neglecting the discourse of power”, Vormbusch shifts the analytical angle towards “the participants’ agency and their capacities of critique”.

In her contribution to this volume, Ota de Leonardis brings to light a “semantic shift” towards “spatialization” of inequality that obscures the “political issues of power” and the “vertical political architecture of modernity”, because of a new ideological “dream of a domination free from any bond with the dominated”. This statement converges with the changes that result from the new calculable global world that this chapter is dedicated to. Sharing the concern of the governmentality agenda for a more precise analysis of what is usually covered by the extensive term “neoliberal”, we identified three distinct components whose combination obscures dependency between individuals and domination bonds.

The first component is political liberalism, currently presented as “horizontal” politics that free autonomous individuals from hierarchies and the kind of hierarchical bonds that we modelled in orders of worth.
Yet, the analysis of the *liberal* grammar shows that, as any grammar of commonality, it creates a dependency between human beings because of the coordination power provided by the format of commonality, and the dominated situation of those who are not in a position to engage in this format. The undeniable emancipatory empowerment of the liberal grammar has a price: all engagements are to be transformed into individual choices—or preferences—for common knowledge options. Even intimate bodily engagements involved in sexual and love relationships, for which this liberal emancipation is widely recognized, have to be transformed into common knowledge options designated as “sexual preferences”.

The second component is the *market* competition convention of coordination. It is distinct from the *liberal* grammar because of its two dominating common forms: money and price. Yet the connection between liberal politics and market competition is easily made possible by confusing options with market goods, and “choosing” with “buying”.

The third component strengthens this connection by encompassing in market goods a wide variety of conceptions of the common good, or fundamental rights, as certifiable and assessable properties of these goods. In an unprecedented extension of the commodity fetishism that Marx exposed, the combination of these three components reinforces the illusion that human beings are freed from dependency and hierarchy bonds and only connected through a world of things, becoming independent opting individuals facing an array of secured options. Yet, unless critical capacity recovers from the illusions of an assessable world, as we have seen among some “smallholders” and NGOs, under the pressure of the new calculable world people’s temper might become incalculable.

**Acknowledgements** In addition to discussions with other authors of this volume, I am grateful to Ota de Leonardis and Robert Salais for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this chapter, and Andrea Mennicken for her careful reading and relevant suggestions.

## NOTES

1. Because of our attention to conflicting valuations in calculability, we depart from other uses of the term in literature, such as Callon and Muniesa (2006).
2. This approach is particularly suited to relate statistics with the history of the new state of the Soviet Union, as demonstrated by Martine Mespoulet in her chapter in this volume (see Chapter 2, “Creating a Socialist Society and Quantification in the USSR”).

3. Wendy Espeland developed an important and influential research agenda on “commensuration” (Espeland & Stevens, 1998), without linking this programme explicitly to the study of the modes and politics of producing equivalence.

4. For recent comparative research, conducted in the same spirit, on changes in lifelong learning systems among five European countries (Germany, Denmark, France, Sweden, UK), see Verdier (2017). Magnus Paulsen Hansen (2017) pragmatically followed the processes of justification and critique, emancipation and coercion, as well as quantified modes of “trying the unemployed”, in comparative research on measurement, measures and evaluation that compose contemporary unemployment reforms in Denmark and France aimed at the “Active Society”.

5. For a recent overview on the sociology of quantification, see Diaz-Bone and Didier (2016).

6. Directed by Emmanuelle Cheyns (CIRAD), this research project was funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) (grant No. ANR-11-CEPL-0009). See Cheyns (2014, 2011), Cheyns and Thévenot (2019a), Thévenot (2018). See also the research carried on by Laura Silva-Castañeda (2012).

7. I do not refer here to the precisely delimited concept of “voice” that Albert Hirschman distinguished from “loyalty” and “exit” (Hirschman, 1970), but to the sequence of operations of attesting, protesting and contesting (see section “A-testing, Pro-testing and Con-testing: Substitutes for the Judicial System in Putting the Standard Enforcement to a Critical Test” of this chapter).

8. A large part of the original article on “social coding” (Thévenot, 1983) has been made available in English (Thévenot, 2016) with additional comments benefiting from thirty years’ experience with the analysis of investments in qualification and quantification, unfolded in Convention Theory.

9. On the relations with Bourdieu’s approach to [symbolic] forms, see Thévenot (2011b, 2016); to Simmel’s forms, see Thévenot (2017).

10. Foucault’s *Les mots et les choses* (“Words and things”, translated as *The order of things* (see Foucault, 1971 [1966])) also exerted a significant influence over our initial research, as evidenced in the title of the article presenting our research on classifications, “Words and numbers [*les mots et les chiffres*]: socio-professional nomenclatures” (Desrosières &
Thévenot, 1979). Because of the close attention Foucault paid to power-knowledge and the variety of forms of bringing together [*rapprochement*], his influence departed from that of Bourdieu.

11. For more detailed presentations of this avenue of research in English and its continuation in Convention Theory and French Pragmatic Sociology, see Amossé (2013), Desrosières (2011), Diaz-Bone (2016), Thévenot (2016).

12. A new generation of sociologists well versed in quantitative methods replicated and elaborated further the experimental games: Amossé (2013), Deauviou et al. (2014), and Penissat et al. (2015).

13. Any unequal ordering or ranking among human beings threatens an ideal of a *common humanity* which has been endorsed by various moral, religious and political principles. We found that two distinctive features—shared by all orders of worth but not all repertoires of evaluation—are intended to appease this threat: (1) the “superiority” of more *worthy* should benefit all, as far as their *worth* is linked to a construction of the *common good*; and (2) this “superiority” or unequal qualification for worth should not be permanently ascribed to their persons but regularly *put to the reality test* of effective coordinated actions.

14. For a wide view on the future and expectations, see Beckert (2011, 2016).

15. Robert Salais and Michael Storper devised a pluralist approach to the organization of economic activity which has some family resemblance with orders of worth but aims at integrating production and market. It differentiates “worlds of production” through institutions, social practices and conventions, which coordinate economic actors by defining specific “frameworks of economic action” (Storper & Salais, 1997). Quite independently, Roger Friedland and Robert Alford have developed another pluralist approach of organizations in terms of “institutional logics” (Friedland & Alford, 1991) which became influential in the English literature on organizational studies, and only recently came into dialogue with Convention Theory and Pragmatic Sociology (Brandl et al., 2014; Cloutier & Langley, 2013; Patriotta et al., 2011).

16. François Hartog underlined the contemporary “presentism” by situating it in a succession of “regimes of historicity” (Hartog, 2003).

17. On the criticism of “flatland”, see De Leonardis (2008). See also our concluding critical discussion in this chapter on this point.

18. In his contribution to this volume, Thomas Amossé examines the continuation of this history and the recent rise of “matched panels” techniques involved in a quasi-experimental evaluation of incentive policies targeted at specific populations, and intended to establish “purified causalities” of “good variables” on individuals’ behaviours.

19. *Engaging in familiarity* hardly achieves a mutuality which remains partial. It is obtained by communicating through personally and emotionally
invested “common-places” of extremely unequal scales, from the closest
level of intimacy in love or friendship to wide communities. The good of
ease in familiarity can turn into evil when oppressing other engagements,
or made instrumental in populist politics. On these issues, see Thévenot
(2014, 2020).

20. The sociological use of the “taken-for-granted” of “lifeworld” mainly sticks to this first side of *engaging in familiarity* usually termed “routine”.

21. A meta-norm principle borrowed from the “International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labeling” (ISEAL), which enacts standards of standards and defines “what credibility looks like for standard systems”, is called “engagement” and introduces this governance principle with the following definition: “Engagement. Standards-setters engage a balanced and representative group of stakeholders in standards development. Standards systems provide meaningful and accessible opportunities to participate in governance, assurance and monitoring and evaluation. They empower stakeholders with fair mechanisms to resolve complaints” (see https://www.isealliance.org/credible-sustainability-standards/isealcredibility-principles, accessed 16 June 2020).

22. On the reduction of European Community government and evaluation to “guidelines” which are themselves reduced to quantitative “indicators”, with the detailed case of the guideline “Ensure inclusive labour markets”, see Salais (2006, 2017). More on the distance between the political rhetorical justification one can see in the wording of guidelines and the effective policies that are driving their monitoring through performance indicators can be found in Salais’ contribution to this volume. On benchmarking for state policies, see also Bruno and Didier (2013).

23. In the 2013 changes, forty new indicators were added, such as the quantified “4.4.4. mill water use per ton of Fresh Fruit Bunches (FFB)”, “4.6.2. records of pesticide use”, “5.4.1. renewable energy use and fossil fuel use per ton or Crude Palm Oil (CPO)”.

24. On the normative principle of “Free, Prior and Informed Consent”, its anchoring in the *liberal* grammar of individual choice, and possible or contingent extension to peoples’ collective consent, see Cheyns and Thévenot (2019a, 2019b).

25. This sense of curiosity to others is nowadays frequently observed in norms and practices of US liberal communities (Berger, 2012; Eliasoph, 2011). Curiously *engaging in exploration* converges with the key insistence on “experience” that was at the heart of Dewey’s pragmatism.

26. Our young Javanese translator who accompanied us in the field, although moved by a curiosity as strong as ours, was not able to understand and thus translate without ambiguity the wording of the landmarks. He was obviously lacking the *familiar engagement* with the places thus named and pointed to by the villagers.
27. After a Greenpeace campaign in 2010, Burger King, Unilever and Nestlé cancelled their supplier contracts with GAR subsidiaries due to unsustainable farming practices. GAR adopted afterwards a zero-deforestation policy which required Greenpeace, GAR and a consultancy firm to develop a tool to codify and quantify forest called the High Carbon Stock (HCS) approach. Because of the pre-eminence of the *liberal* grammar, it still rests on the format of relations to the land and bargaining negotiations that raise criticisms similar to those reported here (Cheyns et al., 2020).

28. On the opening of legal studies to a wider variety of modes of normativity, see the special issue in English of *La Revue des Droits de l'Homme* dedicated to "Modes on normativity and normative transformations", edited and introduced by Véronique Champeil-Desplats, Jérôme Porta and Laurent Thévenot (Champeil-Desplats et al., 2019). On the "transformation' of social rights [transferred] under modes of normativity other than those of human rights", such as objectives, programmes, indicators, standards, see in this special issue Porta (2019).

29. In addition to the numerous meetings that were held in connection with the production of this book, Andrea Mennicken and Peter Miller hospitably organized an additional side-meeting at the LSE in April 2017, with Uwe Vormbusch, initiator and go-between, and myself. This meeting nurtured my comments that still do not pretend to synthetize the generous and considerate conversations we then had.

30. Exchange during the London meeting.

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<figure><img src="image_20.png" /></figure>
# Do Performance Indicators Improve the Effectiveness of Development Aid?

Ousmane Oumarou Sidibé

Performance indicators, inspired by benchmarking techniques invented in the private sector, are increasingly used in public management, according to the notion that in order to survive in a competitive environment, countries must continually improve their organization by importing “best practices” that prevail among their “competitors” (OECD & World Bank, 2008). Alain Supiot calls this the “dogmatics of universal competition” (Supiot, 2009). These indicators are the cornerstone of results-based management (Managing for Development Results, MfDR) and have become the key criteria for measuring the effectiveness of public policies, on the basis of quantitative targets. Governments are anxious to gain points in international rankings by any means, focusing especially on the Human Sustainable Development Index compiled by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). In this index, countries are ranked according to a series of indicators that implicitly set a norm, suggesting that the “lowest performing” countries need to better their scores. In this framework performance indicators have become a formidable tool in the

<footnote>O. O. Sidibé (✉)
University of Bamako, Bamako, Mali</footnote>
hands of a few international experts, who insidiously impose far-reaching public policy choices on states, in the absence of any real debate among citizens.

In Third World countries these indicators are in effect used by international funding bodies to orient development aid in the context of a change of strategy, shifting from “project aid” to budget support, in keeping with the Paris Declaration of 2 March 2005.¹ There is now an international consensus that management of project aid, largely controlled by funding bodies, undermines the responsibility of recipient countries, hampers mobilization of resources and raises transaction costs. In response to this criticism, the ministers in charge of development from developed and developing countries, and officials of bilateral and multilateral funding organizations convened in Paris on 2 March 2005. At this meeting they resolved to reform delivery and management of aid as stated in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. To make aid more effective the Paris Declaration underscored the following five principles:

*Ownership:* Recipient countries set their own public policy and strategy in the framework of Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS), which are the reference documents of public policy;

*Alignment:* Donor countries align their support with the recipient countries' national priorities, systems and procedures of public financial management, instead of each following its own system;

*Harmonization:* Donor countries coordinate their choice of sectors to support (education, public health, etc.), control and reporting procedures to be put into place, and share information to avoid overlapping action;

*Results:* Recipient countries work with partners to define results expected from funded programmes and on their evaluation;

*Mutual accountability:* Donors and recipient countries are both accountable for results achieved in development action.

The general budget support recommended by the Paris Declaration is intended to improve mobilization of resources and foster greater mutual responsibility of donors and beneficiaries of aid.²

In the course of the 1990s, some African countries, among them Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique, were able to shift from project aid to budget support. In West Africa, Mali was a pioneer of budget support aid,
under a Framework Arrangement for general budget support agreed in March 2006 by the government of Mali and funding bodies. Agreements for sectoral budget support in the areas of education, public health and decentralization and institutional development were concluded respectively on 18 July 2006, 19 July 2006 and 11 September 2009. Under these agreements, the disbursement of aid in these sectors is contingent upon attaining quantitative figures for a number of indicators.³ Advocates of this approach see in it a way to bring the authorities in recipient countries to report to funding institutions on the results of development programmes, in exchange for greater (although “under surveillance”) responsibility in the use of the resources attributed. To link action undertaken to results obtained and more systematically monitor performance, the funding bodies outline results chains in loan agreements. These results chains form part of the logical framework that connects the objectives, the activities pursued to attain them, the resources deployed and the results obtained in relation to those expected, and the impact achieved.

This chapter illustrates how these performance indicators have contributed to undermine public policies in Africa. We look at several examples drawn from experience in Mali, particularly in education and public health. This research highlights the harmful effects of performance indicators (Sect. “The Harmful Effects of Performance Indicators”), queries the meaning of management by indicators (Sect. “Querying Performance-based Management in Third World Countries”) and takes up the issue of the autonomy of aid recipient countries in management of their public policy (Sect. “Giving Aid Recipient Countries Greater Autonomy to Conduct Their Public Policy”).

## THE HARMFUL EFFECTS OF PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

Upon close examination it becomes clear that the use of performance indicators in managing public affairs often leads to outcomes that are contrary to the stated objectives (Desrosières, 2014). In the education sector in Mali, while indicators pertaining to the gross enrolment rate in the primary education fundamental cycle (71.0% in 2013) and to the completion rate for the fundamental cycle (51.0% in 2013) (Ministry of the Economy & Finances, 2014) attest to progress in universal schooling, they have nonetheless had undesirable effects on the education system.

It should be remembered that the widespread introduction of performance indicators for education in Africa was based on thinking that lent
credence to the idea that education in Africa suffered more from poor governance than from inadequate funding (Boone, 1996; Mingat & Tan, 1998). This neoliberal theory, very much in vogue at the World Bank at the time, was supported by international comparisons of the internal efficiency of education systems, measuring the number of years in school against the share of spending for education in GDP (see Mingat & Suchaut, 2000; Olivier & Orivel, 1999).

International rankings do indeed reveal the low efficiency of African education systems in the 1990s, compared to Asian and Latin American countries where pupils stayed in school twice as long, on average, for the same proportion of GDP spent on education. This theory, positing that school performance is not fundamentally related to the volume of financial resources allocated to education, had earlier been advanced in other contexts in Brazil and in the United States, most notably in the Coleman Report in 1966 (Hanushek, 1997; Harbison & Hanushek, 1992). Subsequently, this theory served as the “scientific” basis for a number of decisions that can be seen as factors in the present crisis of education systems in Africa.

Under agreements with international aid donors, the national education ministers of African countries were pushed to apply brutal reforms with the sole aim of improving the internal yield of the systems, without regard for the quality of teaching. In this context various highly debatable measures were taken in order to maintain the largest body of teachers possible with the lowest possible payroll costs. Continuing to follow international comparisons, we recall that in the 1980s the Bretton Woods institutions worked hard to demonstrate that African teachers were overpaid, and that this hampered universal schooling. They strongly recommended that these countries recruit more teachers, for the same aggregate payroll expenditure. On the strength of this advice salaries were sometimes drastically cut, as in Cameroon, resulting in a demotivation of the teaching body, with foreseeable consequences for the quality of teaching. This theory was also the basis for the creation of different categories of teaching personnel in all African countries (non-civil-servant status, contract workers, volunteers, etc.). The first non-civil-servant teachers were hired in Mali in 1991, in general, technical and vocational secondary education. This practice was extended to primary education in 1992, and at an ever greater pace thereafter. In 2002, 95% of new teachers hired were contract workers.
The only justification for the introduction of this new type of staff was the desire to create new categories of teachers, without civil service status and trade union representation, and poorly paid, in order to attain the targets and improve the internal efficiency of the system as measured by indicators. The aim was to formally achieve universal school attendance, to improve ranking under the Human Sustainable Development Index (UNDP) as well as according to the Millennium Development Goals standard (MDG).

Today the undesirable effects of this policy cannot be denied. Impartial observers recognize that non-civil-servant teachers lack both the training and professional ethics required for this function. Corruption in schools is largely due to the status of this group of teachers. Poorly paid at the outset, poorly trained, receiving little consideration and without any real perspective for professional advancement, these teachers had few reasons to observe ethical standards, in which they had never been inculcated in any event. Having never felt included in this profession, they brought the educational system to its knees.⁴ In hoping to economize on payroll costs, the country had disinvested in its essential resource, teachers.

Another unexpected effect of the massive introduction of non-professionals into the teaching body, in order to boost performance indicators, was to discourage civil-servant teachers. Many ultimately gave up in the face of the unorthodox practices of their young colleagues recruited from any number of different trades (accountants, plumbers, electricians, even individuals without degree or diploma) whose only motivation was to avoid unemployment. The most surprising aspect of this is that the Bretton Woods institutions, with all the brainpower within their ranks, did not foresee that once non-professional teachers had attained a level of critical mass within the system they too would seek to have the same advantages accorded to their civil-servant colleagues, which would wipe out the payroll savings purportedly achieved by hiring non-professionals. For quite a few years in Mali now, the issues pursued by teachers' unions have focused mainly on acquiring the same remuneration for non-civil servants and for civil servants.

Another paradox of this system is that the conditions for the application of structural adjustment programmes led countries like Mali to close most teacher training schools in the 1980s, and to implement voluntary early retirement schemes for civil servants in order to reduce overall remuneration costs, thus creating a shortage of qualified personnel in the education sector.⁵ When in the 1990s social services were granted
priority for hiring civil servants, there were no more qualified teachers in the job market. This led to a massive influx of insufficiently trained people in the categories of teachers created outside of the civil service, provoking serious disturbances in the education system (strikes, successive "blank" academic years, etc.). On top of this, in their desire to mechanically raise the schooling rate, education authorities were less rigorous in their oversight of ethnic-community-based schools and medersas, for instance, schooling dispensed in Arabic. In a country where French is still the official language this could only aggravate youth unemployment (Ministry of the Economy & Finances, 2014).

It was also with encouragement from the World Bank that African governments fostered the development of community schools, financed by village communities. These schools were housed in straw huts, with pupils seated on grass mats, without textbooks or school supplies. The teachers sometimes had not even completed primary school, and with salaries three to five times lower than remuneration in public schools, the quality of teaching was severely affected. Other highly debatable teaching reforms were undertaken in the pursuit of good indicator scores. In Mali, for example, one teacher might be assigned to teach two grade levels at the same time in the same room, the pupils doubling up on the benches (double load), or to teach two groups of pupils of the same grade level alternating morning and afternoon (double time).

The internal efficiency of a teaching cycle is also measured by the capacity to retain pupils from the beginning to the end of the cycle. To obtain a good score the system is likely to artificially limit the number of pupils repeating a year, even if the pupils have failed to improve, for the simple reason that repeating a year is considered to be a waste of public money (Mingat & Suchaut, 2000). Brutally applied, this way of thinking has without any doubt led to bargain-basement teaching in countries like Mali. To boost the completion rate for the fundamental cycle of primary education the National Education Ministry in Mali instituted in the 1990s a policy designed to pass as many pupils as possible to the next higher grade level, even with very poor results (as low as 2/10). This manifestly eroded the overall achievement level. Testing to measure basic skills (reading, writing, arithmetic) has shown a notable drop in achievement among pupils in Mali, and even a critical failure in subjects such as Mathematics and French (CONFEMEN, 2004). What is worse, and again with the notion of boosting indicator scores related to internal system efficiency, many African countries formed class groups of 100 or 200 pupils,
assigned to harassed teachers, with disastrous consequences for the quality of teaching.

The consequences of these policies on teaching are such that today we question them, in pursuit of a more coherent system. Education systems are too complex to apply an analysis based on quantitative factors, as for factory production. If efficiency is defined as the ratio between a given result (duration of schooling) and financial resources consumed to attain it, this indicator is not in itself significant. We must look farther and measure the impact of the system as a whole. More broadly, one of the effects of mechanical application of performance indicators has been the creation of a two-tier education system in all African countries; public schools are open to all, with the prime mission of raising the schooling rate, while schools in the private sector are reserved for a rich minority of the population who seek a certain level of quality, and at the same time lessen pressure on the public purse.

The pernicious effects of performance-based management can be seen through indicators that measure budgetary expenditure in sectors deemed to be high priority. While indicators that measure the share of the national budget devoted to so-called high priority sectors (education, public health, agriculture) provide an incentive to concentrate resources in these sectors, they also have the drawback of pushing the government administrations in question to spend public money on measures that do not always improve the provision of services to the public.

In addition to questions of the quality of public expenditure and the capacity of these sectors to absorb this money, the use of these indicators drives ministries to analyse their budgets not in terms of needs, but in terms of percentage of the national budget, leading to sterile quarrels and competition throughout the budget process. In this respect it can be observed that priorities have shifted to infrastructure investment in the most recent generation of Poverty Reduction Strategies. As grain prices have been rising on world markets, agriculture, which was until recently neglected, is moving up in the list of priorities. While one can only express satisfaction with this particular evolution, as a general rule we observe regular changes in priority goals, an illustration of the fragility of objectives when they are not popularly supported.

Successive reforms, sometimes abandoned before completion, often for reasons related to the international agenda, without consultation of the people, is a source of real instability in public policy in developing
countries. In this respect Africa appears to be a laboratory for all sorts of experiments.

In the area of justice, indicators pertaining to the number of judges per capita and to construction and renovation of judicial infrastructure (courthouses, prisons, housing for magistrates, etc.) give an idea of public budget support for this sector. These indicators do not, however, in themselves give information on the quality of justice, or on the independence of the judiciary, and even less on the level of satisfaction of those who have recourse to the courts. Quite the contrary, application of these two indicators combined pushes governments to concentrate their efforts on hiring judges and building courthouses, to the detriment of other crucial measures to institute fair remuneration of judicial personnel and to strengthen the ethics of the judicial apparatus as a whole.

One of the great weaknesses of “trigger indicators”, i.e. those that determine the amounts of aid to be paid annually under funding agreements, lies precisely in the fact that recipient countries have incentives to focus on attaining the objectives that have been given, to the detriment of other aspects of public policy. The quest to reach the target figure set for the indicator becomes something of an obsession, detached from the policy it is meant to support. The finance ministry, anxious to cash in on the money promised by donors, puts pressure on other government administrations to attain the key indicator levels, and there is a great temptation to doctor the figures when objectives are not reached.

But a national indicator, by nature, does not reflect the conditions and the results of a public policy in distinct geographic areas. There are indeed strong disparities between regions. Looking at education in Mali, while the national rate of completion of the first cycle of schooling was 51.0% in 2013, this average encompassed significant differences across regions. The Bamako district registered the highest completion rate, with 77.9%, while in the districts of Kayes, Koulikoro, Ségou and Sikasso this rate stood at 44.4, 64.9, 49.5 and 53.5% respectively (Ministry of the Economy & Finances, 2014). The same disparities are found for public health indicators and access to drinking water. Globally speaking, the Bamako district is situated well above the national average, while interior regions, in particular in the north of the country, have lower scores. This underscores the dilemma of the northern part of the country, where repeated and ongoing rebellions are in part linked to differences in development between regions. These differences are not reflected in the national indicators published in international rankings.
Along the same lines, certain indicators must be carefully examined, and cross-analysed in conjunction with other data. While the pupil/teacher ratio for fundamental primary education (first cycle) is a relevant indicator, in that it describes the level of adult interaction with pupils, it must nonetheless be counterbalanced with the fact that in the schools with the most teachers (in cities) many of them are deployed in administrative positions, rather than in classrooms, or are simply extra staff on hand.

The public health indicator stating the percentage of the population that lives within five kilometres of a functional healthcare centre (56% in 2013) does not inform us as to the real accessibility of healthcare (Ministry of the Economy & Finances, 2014). We know that due to the paucity of medicines available in healthcare centres, and frequently to understaffing (as centres are located farther from large cities), the local population has little reason to go to these centres. People, especially the poorest, are likely to have recourse to traditional medicine, or worse to obtain remedies from “itinerant pharmacists” who are quacks and deliver counterfeit drugs. According to the 2013 report on implementation of PRS credits, barely one in three people in Mali visited a healthcare centre in the course of the year (Ministry of the Economy & Finances, 2014). It is rare that someone living in Mali would not have a health problem at least once a year, especially as malaria is endemic. The fact is that the economic accessibility of healthcare is the real challenge, in all African countries.

Furthermore, some indicators are difficult to quantify, contrary to what some may think. Two examples in the area of national health insurance (“sécurité sociale”) coverage are the percentage of the population covered by secondary insurance (“mutuelles”) and the percentage of the poor population that has medical coverage. This is a real preoccupation, as traditional social safety nets are becoming weaker, and are less and less able to cushion the social problems of the poor. However, it is difficult to compile reliable information on secondary health insurers, their subscribers and the services offered, as this is an informal sector that has sprung up in a legal and institutional framework that is inadequate.

It can also be noted that indicators are sometimes far from comparable between countries, contrary to what is intended. The 2013 report on implementation of PRS credits gives an unemployment rate of 7.9%, which is quite surprising when compared with that of developed countries (Ministry of the Economy & Finances, 2014). Knowing that this figure
refers to persons of working age who meet both of the following conditions—without economic activity during the period, or without formal employment and availability to take a job—it is easy to understand that the indicator masks massive under-employment, to the order of 80% in most African countries. The vast majority of people considered to be unaffected by unemployment in fact work in subsistence agriculture or in the informal sector, and work only a few months in the year. The expansion of the informal economy is one of the key mutations of the labour market in Africa over the last two decades. The structure of employment has been considerably transformed by a shift from jobs in the formal sector to work in the informal sector, which has become a sponge absorbing the urban workforce. The informal sector adapts quickly to the real circumstances of the labour market, and the ease of taking and leaving work makes it attractive, in particular for vulnerable groups such as women. Research has shown that even within a single country, comparison of unemployment figures over the long term is problematic, because of the transformation of the phenomenon itself (on this issue see Salais, 1986; Thélot, 1985).

## QUERYING PERFORMANCE-BASED MANAGEMENT IN THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES

In technocratic circles in the Third World, performance indicators are considered to be the miracle cure that will ensure proper use of public money. The most sceptical of technocrats see these tools as a practice imposed by international donors to force the leaders of recipient countries to finally be accountable for their management. But few people seek to understand what is really at stake. Indeed, these new tools of international cooperation based on quantitative objectives may appear comfortable for managers. A time frame and evaluation grid that are known in advance are components that can be reassuring for policy chiefs, who are looking for immediate results.

It is nonetheless true that a mechanical application of these tools leaves no room for in-depth thinking to accompany complex processes that involve fundamental changes, sometimes even a cultural revolution, setting off profound movements in society. One of the problems of performance-based management is to define relevant and legitimate targets. Reaching a consensus on targets is truly a challenge, as it is difficult to set priorities that are acceptable to a broad majority. While it may be easy to agree on objectives in a corporation (lowering costs, raising
productivity and profits, etc.), finding a consensus is much more arduous in the public sector. The aims of public policy are multiple, and sometimes contradictory, so reaching consensus can be extremely laborious. It is true that it is the duty of those who govern to manage public resources properly and report on their use to citizens, and this makes the principle of Managing for Development Results (MfDR) legitimate. But first there must be agreement on the meaning and substance of this concept, for the results culture is not the same everywhere on the globe.

Let there be no mistake, the choice of indicators is not politically neutral. Since the beginning of the 1990s, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and with the growing move to democracy in Africa, “governance” has become the central theme of international aid and cooperation, the lens through which the relations between international donors and aid recipients are seen (James, 1998; Olivier de Sardan, 2007). A technocratic conception, inspired by the aims of reducing deficits and restricting the role of state government, now governs the relations between aid donors and recipients under cooperation agreements, with considerable room for sanctions against countries that deviate from prescribed practice in terms of good governance (on this issue see Meisel & Ould, 2008). In reality in Western countries, fervent advocates of MfDR (Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, etc.), this reform inspired by neoliberal economic thought is intimately tied to systematic budget cuts as part of a move to clean up public finances, and these cuts become an end in and of themselves. Without a doubt the neoliberal free market movement of the 1980s that propounded the notion of “less government” and relegated social and cultural issues to the back burner had major repercussions on public policy in countries that receive aid.

What should we make of the fact that a country like Mali, heir to an ancient culture, home to world heritage sites in the old cities of Djenné, Tombouctou and Gao, guardian of thousands of ancient manuscripts, has no public policy indicator pertaining to the safeguarding of these treasures?

Likewise, social protection is analysed within the confines of the official outward-looking system, that posits the modern system as its model and refers only to the tools used in official regimes, which are meant to be extended more or less as is, to the rest of the population without taking into account peoples' needs, or existing mechanisms. It has to be recognized, however, that the state of healthcare coverage in Africa
cannot be remedied using only existing tools associated with formal insur-
ance regimens that cover between 5 and 10% of the population. There
are other mechanisms of solidarity and redistribution, however. Research
has described the faltering of traditional solidarity systems, under the
effect of increasing focus on the individual, a process in African societies
driven by monetization, urbanization and the consequences of neoliberal
economics. This has led some authors, such as Axelle Kabou, to ques-
tion the capacity of African society to stand up in the face of these social
changes (Kabou, 1991). Others, including Vimard and Locoh, are willing
to bet on the adaptive capacity of African solidarity mechanisms (Locoh,
1988, 1993a, b, 1995; Vimard & N'cho, 1997;). A number of solutions
can be proposed as ways to integrate traditional solidarity into the global
system of social protection. It is clear that indicators pertaining only to
these covered by modern social security systems cannot be expected to
reflect the reality of social protection in Africa.

In this context, how can a new social contract be devised, setting
reciprocal obligations for families, communities, local authorities, civil
society and the national government, in order to ensure that the poorest
members of society have effective rights to social protection? What forms
of consultation and cooperation between all the players are needed to
renew thinking and means of action to address the real needs in the
sector? These are the fundamental questions that must be answered to
set up a complete and coherent social protection system.

In truth, the notions of ownership and responsibility touted by the
Paris Declaration have not yielded “true” appropriation, but have resulted
in national domestic policy piloted by donor countries. The Paris Declara-
tion does not afford truly autonomous action, without which there can be
no responsibility on the part of recipient countries. With a knife to their
throats, the recipient states must sometimes accept to see their public poli-
cies guided by the key indicators that are imposed, with the hope that they
may regain some degree of control later. Furthermore, while donor coun-
tries have made significant progress in coordinating their action, much
remains to be done by the recipient countries to improve their internal
coordination (among different government ministries) and set their own
priorities for discussion with donors. This is due to weak national leader-
ship, and to the weak institutional capacity of national administrations that
do not yet possess the means to implement results-based management.

There is abundant literature that shows how institutional variables
affect the performance of public policy (Burki & Perry, 1998; Fukuyama,
2004; Persson & Tabellini, 1997). The quality or weakness of institutions are factors that explain time and time again the success or failure of many aspects of reform in states that receive development aid (Burnside & Dollar, 1997; Dollar & Easterly, 1999; Sindzingre, 1998). On this point, it can only be regretted that under structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s these countries were led to drastically “shrink” their rosters of civil servants (which were in fact quite meagre already), and to create numerous programme management units. This was not conducive to a stable institutional environment. In Mali, for instance, all administrative reform measures in this period were undertaken in the name of “management of structures and staffing”, a culture that continues to mark government administration in the country.

Likewise, and even if some donor countries have aligned practices with those of recipient countries, different types of aid may coexist, sometimes within the same programme, and with the same donor. This coexistence may impose considerable burdens on the national government in terms of record-keeping and reporting, taking time away from action to provide services to the people, which after all is the purpose of the aid. States deemed to be fragile, with little human resources, are forcibly given sophisticated tools that they are not well equipped to implement. In the same way, programme managers in aid recipient countries spend a good deal of their time collecting data on progress to attain “target values” for indicators, on reporting tasks and on discussion of these issues with representatives of donor countries. Clearly, this is time not devoted to work managing the programmes themselves, undermining the objectives of results-based management. In fact, performance-based management, invented in the private sector, is not readily transposed to the public sector, where it is less effective by reason of the very nature of public service. It would be pointless to try to measure with strict accuracy the cost of public action, precisely because these services are provided for all citizens.

In the Sahel countries, for example, government administration does not adequately cover the vast desert areas, and consequently the poor level of service to citizens (healthcare, education, safety and security of people and property, etc.) are factors of instability. In Mali, the sparse population in the north means low resources for local authorities as well as particular constraints in terms of economic, social and territorial organization (highly dispersed population, little infrastructure, open spaces, nomadic peoples). Low population density goes hand in hand with underprivileged
areas that are poorly served in terms of basic amenities (water, schools, healthcare) and are remote and isolated. With little capacity to harness financial resources and hence low investment, low population and remote location, these territories are subject to additional costs that should not be borne by the local population alone. As equal access to public services is an imperative principle of republican government, it is not reasonable to apply across the board the same performance indicators—and most notably the ratio of public expenditure per capita—for public service throughout the country.

Referring to other contexts, Daniel Kaufman has given a very good description of the limits of management by indicators and this modelling of public action (Kaufman & Kraay, 2007). All this is to say that the real challenge facing developing countries, particularly in Africa, is to rebuild the capacities undermined by decades of structural adjustment and to regain a measure of negotiating power in their relations with international donors.

## GIVING AID RECIPIENT COUNTRIES GREATER AUTONOMY TO CONDUCT THEIR PUBLIC POLICY

The dependence of developing countries with respect to donors is a notion that encompasses several different aspects (Naudet, 1999). In the most common sense, this dependence refers to the situation in which outside aid continues to weigh heavily in national budgets, while levels of development and internal financial capacity stagnate (see Azam et al., 1999). Dependence can also be apprehended through indicators, such as the share of aid in GDP, or in the conditions of aid allocation. Above all, dependence is characterized by little room to negotiate with donors. In this light the faltering capacity of recipient countries, the “fragile states”, takes on new meaning, particularly in Africa. Chronic political instability, military coups and armed rebellion are among the ills that plague African states, described as oligarchic, neo-patrimonial, fragile, failed, among the long string of adjectives that flourish in the “post-colonial” approaches that predominate in political science literature since the 1980s (on this issue see Haut Conseil de la Coopération International, 2005; World Bank, 2006; but also Badie, 1992; Devarajan et al., 1999).

With very few exceptions (Cabo Verde, Botswana, South Africa, Rwanda), African countries struggle to establish state structures that are able to conduct strong public policy on their own, and to meet the needs
of citizens, while resisting the demands of international donors (on this
issue see Joseph, 1999; Mhonimpa, 1994; Prest et al., 2005). On this
continent more than elsewhere, the relations between donors and recip-
ient countries are skewed, and even coercive, with stringent conditions
and ever more exacting timetables for implementation. Indeed, while
in the spirit of the Paris Declaration indicators are to be chosen from
the grids in PRS documents or from the logical frameworks of sectoral
programmes, in truth it is the weight of the funding institutions that is
the determining factor, in particular for setting the target values to be
attained. Furthermore, this is the justification for the fact that negotia-
tions on the budgetary arrangements that frame budgetary support last
for months and absorb all the energy of programme managers. These
arrangements set, among others, the “trigger indicators” that authorize
disbursement of variable tranches of aid. The choice of “target values”,
i.e. the quantitative objectives to be reached each year as policy is imple-
mented, are the focus of especially tough discussions. Be as it may, in
the end it is always the donors who have their way, recalling the famous
saying of the Malian philosopher Amadou Hampaté Bâ, who noted that
“the hand that gives is always above the hand that receives”. This situation
is illustrated by the words of a representative of donor countries:

The Malian government pilots the plane; we make sure there is a flight plan
and that the altitude is properly measured; if the needle of the altimeter is
not good, we will find better instruments for the pilot. (Bergamashi, 2009,
p. 27)

Coordination between donors and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposes cross-linked conditions, increasing the pressure on the recipient countries. This type of condition-measures creating the obligation to link disbursement to progress markers set in advance under funding agreements-is in fact embedded in the mandate of international financial institutions, and is considered to be a sign of their credibility (Kanbur et al., 1999). It is hard to comply with these conditions, which explains the ambivalent attitude of recipient countries towards the reforms imposed by donors. Their formal acceptance often gives way to resistance in different forms when it comes to implementation (see Azam et al., 1999; Collier, 1997; Kahler, 1992). Faced with the difficulty of meeting some of the required conditions, recipient governments may turn to various subterfuges to postpone, circumvent or vitiate these rules. In
some cases, conditions are suspended, knowing that from the outset recipient governments evaluate the costs of not complying with the conditions (see Bird, 1998; Bayart et al., 2002).

Paradoxically, the states with the least institutional capacity to manage the weighty apparatus of management by indicators are those on whom the donors impose the most stringent terms of conditionality, because they lack the capacity to negotiate. By setting ambitious goals the donors perhaps thought they would lift the recipients out of the danger zone; in fact, they have pushed them in deeper. In this respect, the annual joint review of aid by both donor and recipient countries are truly examinations, intended to assess the level attained for the indicators retained under the funding agreements. They are above all a humiliating experience for the recipient governments, when ordinary civil servants from aid agencies conduct themselves as judges, pronouncing sentences without appeal, setting the level of aid that will be disbursed, according to their appraisal of the results obtained.

It must also be said, however, that conditionality is sometimes exploited by the recipient governments themselves, for internal political purposes; donors can be held up as scapegoats, to justify unpopular (even if often essential) government decisions in the eyes of national public opinion (Collier, 1998; Rodrik, 1996). In reality, behind the pretext of granting greater autonomy to Third World countries to manage the aid they receive, the new approach based on budgetary support is a significant step towards a more political concept of aid, as part of a process to transform the political and social landscape of recipient countries, following pathways already defined by the donor countries. The donors' injunctions are based on a transfer of models, replacing the sociological foundation of states, as if an idealized and disembodied institutional reorganization could be decreed, instead of being worked out by interaction between public authorities and civil society. This forcible transfer of model aggravates the deficit of legitimacy of the state already found in African countries, and further undermines civic and citizen responsibility, by discrediting government action and widening the gap between citizens and the state.

Each donor country has its own world vision, its own framework of reference, that is vaunted in the country's relations with aid recipient countries. The desired transformations are imposed from the outside. This process can even go as far as direct supervision of entire sections of government, as in Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan. All this is to say
that recipient countries should be able to construct their own public poli-
cies, in the context of their specific circumstances, without being forced to
follow an outside model. Countries may be inspired by successful practices
elsewhere, but freely and voluntarily, making the necessary adjustments.
It is a matter of respecting the dignity of states, especially the most fragile
among them. This movement must be advocated by democratic powers
with real popular support and legitimacy from a fully involved civil society.

The fundamental issue is that donor countries must turn away from
what Régis Debray, referring to Europe, has called a culture imbued with
its own formulas when in dialogue with other countries (Debray, 2007).
This is an enormous challenge, because it will oblige donors to change
their intellectual processes and accept cultural diversity, something for
which Western elites are not necessarily prepared. Experience teaches us
that good governance is not achieved by decree. It is constructed by
society in each country, in its specific circumstances. Political dialogue
between donor and recipient countries naturally has a legitimate place,
but the terms of this dialogue must be balanced. Each country should
be allowed to pursue its own trajectory, according to its circumstances.
The notions of the common good, the general interest and even of soli-
darity are not given the same meaning everywhere. Levy and Fukuyama
have clearly shown how approaches diverge, depending on the situations
found in each country (Levy & Fukuyama, 2008).

The concept of the effectiveness of public action is framed differently
in the United States, in Europe and in Africa. Whereas Americans appraise
the effectiveness of public policy through the lens of Schumpeterian “cre-
ative destruction” that enables a system to remain dynamic by eliminating
its least effective agents, Europeans give preference to public funding
based on a social contract. To promote economic and social develop-
ment some Asian countries have emphasized the reinforcement of the
state apparatus, while others, notably in Latin America, have preferred to
bolster democracy in the political system.

CONCLUSION

The growing interest in using indicators to allocate development aid is
closely connected to the needs of world capitalism. In this light, indicators
are needed by investors, including international aid agencies that act as
lenders, as a way to gather information on the quality of governance, and
“country risk”. The underlying idea for investors is to be assured of “good
governance” and of a functioning market economy that will guarantee returns on investment. It is therefore hardly surprising to note that indicators are biased, even if the bias is hidden. This makes use of indicators problematic. In the absence of a universal common reference framework, countries do not necessarily share the same vision of development.

Despite these imperfections, the concept of performance indicators cannot be totally rejected. The problems arise when they are mechanically applied to rank countries, and even to sanction countries depending on their rank. This practice is less and less acceptable, even in schools for evaluating pupils. An indicator should be just that, literally furnishing an indication of the quality of governance, but not in itself a full appraisal of quality. From this point of view, indicators can send a warning on the state of public policy, and foster discussion, without issuing a judgement with no appeal, and are much less a guilty sentence.

Management by performance must in no case be allowed to be a new ideology, or a tool in the hands of a few technocrats who decide what is good for entire nations and impose profound changes on society. This approach can be legitimate only as an inclusive process intended to support discussion and joint efforts to seek the best use of public resources, according to criteria of intelligence, balance and fairness. Elected officials and citizens, through their organizations and associations, must take their full place in this process. To allow people to appropriate this discussion they must be properly informed as to the stakes and outcomes, with access to forums where views can be freely expressed, and the full range of opinion heard, in particular those voiced by the weakest groups in society.

## NOTES

1. Project aid, whether managed by project unit or through institutional support more or less directly administered by funding bodies, is criticized for low disbursement rates, high overhead costs and weak appropriation by recipient countries. For these reasons a number of donors, including the European Union, are turning more and more often to budget support, i.e. aid paid directly into national budgets to fund all activities in the budget without specification (general budget support) or to support certain targeted sectors (sectoral budget support), most often public health and education (Feyzioglu et al., 1996).

2. On issues related to budget support see the study carried out by researchers at the University of Birmingham for the OECD Development Assistance
Committee (DAC) and other donors: IDD and Associates, Evaluation of General Budget Support: Synthesis Report. A joint Evaluation of General Budget Support 1994–2004, May 2006 (IDD & Associates, 2006).

3. On the choice of indicators for budget support, see: Introduction d'indicateurs de Résultat en Matière d'Appui aux Programmes d'Ajustement Structurel dans les Pays ACP, Etude réalisée à la demande de la Commission Européenne, Rapport de Synthèse, Vol.1, CERDI, June 2002.

4. For a discussion of teachers' capacities in Mali see: *La formation des enseignants dans la francophonie: diversités, défis et stratégies d'action* (2007). Montreal: AUF. *Profil de l'enseignant de qualité au Mali*. Oxfam, IE, OPT, SNEC, MEALN, undated. *Principes directeurs pour un profil de compétences national des enseignants du primaire*. Internationale de l'Education, Oxfam Novib, 2012.

5. In principle, teachers and public health personnel were not eligible for early retirement, so as to preserve these social services, but in fact they were the most severely affected, because workers in these sectors suffered from more difficult conditions than civil servants in other sectors.

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# Archaeology of a Quantification Device:
Quantification, Policies and Politics in French
Higher Education

Corine Eyraud

Over the last fifteen years, I have aimed to enter into the analysis of broader phenomena and processes by decoding the genesis and uses of quantification devices.¹ The accounting reform of Chinese state enterprises, for instance, makes it possible to grasp the essence of the Chinese economic reforms of the 1990s (Eyraud, 1999, 2003). The construction and implementation of a system of performance-based management in French universities informs us about the profound transformations these organizations have undergone in the last two decades (Eyraud, 2014; Eyraud et al., 2011). As Alain Desrosières points out, these various studies suggest that “it is possible to look at the same time at social or political philosophies and seemingly technical tools, considering them as a totality” (Desrosières, 2000, p. 84).

<footnote>C. Eyraud (✉)
Department of Sociology, Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, LEST,
Aix-en-Provence, France
e-mail: corine.eyraud@univ-amu.fr</footnote>
However, my recent research on the transformation of French state accounting² (Eyraud, 2013) has shown that an accounting system can be employed in relation to different, sometimes conflicting logics and objectives, for example, in attempts to show that the state is heavily indebted or not so much, to improve public management, or to encourage the outsourcing of public activities. The link between a specific type of quantification device and a particular social or political philosophy does not seem to be univocal; both do perhaps not constitute “a totality”. Hence, the nature and conditions of their linkage have to be questioned. I did this first through a renewed analysis of the French state accounting reform (Eyraud, 2016). This led me to put forward a grid for the analysis of quantification devices which seems capable, first, of casting light on the very nature of this link and, second, of making visible the possible choices involved.

The purpose of this chapter is to test this grid by revisiting our work on performance indicators for French universities. I choose thus to start from the analysis of a concrete quantification device—i.e. performance indicators—and conduct a kind of “archaeologic” analysis, using it as a lens for investigating and understanding the changes French universities have undergone since the mid-2000s. Drawing on the works on quantification done by French social scientists, such as Alain Desrosières (1988 with Thévenot; 1998 [1993], 2003, 2008a, b, 2014), Robert Salais (1986, 2004, 2010, 2016), Alain Supiot (2010, 2015) and Laurent Thévenot (1979, 1983, 1990, 2016), this paper seeks ultimately to enhance our understanding of reactivity.³

The analytical grid I propose distinguishes between three different levels that exist within a quantification device, each of which is examined in a separate section of this chapter. First, there is what might be called the bedrock level: a quantification device is grounded in a founding vision that is generally congruent with a particular form of state or economic system. Second, there is what might be called the intermediate level: a quantification device contains a conception of the objectives and “*raisons d’être*” of the entity that is quantified. Third, there is the level that relates to the micro-conventions of calculation: philosophies can be hidden at this microscopic level and give a particular orientation to the device. However, the analysis of these three levels does not tell us everything about the orientation of the device and the effects it can produce; the device is part of a larger configuration, the context of its deployment and its uses have thus to be examined. That constitutes the fourth dimension
of the analytical grid, which will be examined in the fourth section of this
paper. Returning to the question of the device as a totality, the conclu-
sion will show that this specific device is not a very integrated assemblage,
which explains its real but at the same time also limited effects.

The analysis is based, first, on in-depth interviews with government
and university officials, second, on the study of official documents, reports
and archival materials from parliament, central government, the Ministry
of Higher Education and several universities, and, third, on participant
observation. I conducted participant observations in my role as a member
of the Governing Board and Finance Committee at my own univer-
sity. Further, I was a special adviser to the President of my university
on performance management systems. I attended the training on perfor-
mance indicators and performance management for universities provided
by the Ministry, and I participated in the implementation of the perfor-
mance indicators in my own university. This variety of materials allowed
me to follow the numbers from their birth through their very detailed
construction process to their concrete uses.

THE BEDROCK: NPM, LOLF

Performance indicators are the latest form of public statistics. The devel-
opment of their current form and uses began in some European countries,
such as Sweden or the United Kingdom, in the late 1980s, and was a
part of much a broader phenomenon: the rise of New Public Manage-
ment (NPM). This term is quite ambiguous, even stretchy: it is used to
speak about government reforms implemented in Great Britain during
the Thatcher government, in the United States during the Reagan and
Clinton administrations, in the Netherlands under a Christian-Democrat
government, or in Sweden and New Zealand under Labour governments.
All these reforms have a number of common features but also many differ-
ences (Hood, 1995). The shift in doctrines of public accountability is
part of their common ground. Before NPM, democratic accountability
depended on limiting corruption, waste and incompetence in public
administration. To this end, the public sector was kept sharply distinct
from the private sector in terms of ethos, methods of management, orga-
nizational design, people and career structure. An elaborate system of
procedural rules was designed to prevent favouritism and corruption. In
contrast NPM involved a very different conception of public accountability, with different patterns of trust and distrust. As Hood (1995, p. 94) writes:

> The basis of NPM lies in reversing the two cardinal doctrines of public administration: that is, lessening or removing differences between the public and the private sector and shifting the emphasis from process accountability towards a greater element of accountability in terms of results. Accounting was to be a key element in this new conception of accountability, since it reflected high trust in the market and private business methods and low trust in public servants and professionals.

In this process, the introduction of the “Loi organique relative aux lois de finances” (henceforth referred to as “LOLF”) was in France a very important step. This law, passed in 2001 and taking effect in 2006, introduced performance management and private accounting to the state and public services. The first objective of the LOLF was to make the government and the public services accountable to parliament for the results of their actions, and to give more power to parliament over budgetary policies and choices. Since 2006, French MPs have two new documents for the budget debate: an annual performance plan and an annual performance report for each public policy. The first one determines the objectives for the following year; quantified indicators (known as performance indicators) are used to quantify these objectives and set the targets which have to be reached. The second one gives an account of the results achieved (relative success or relative failure) over the last few years. National performance indicators were set at each level of government and for all public bodies, so that a performance-oriented form of management was introduced throughout the public services and public administration, which was the second objective of the law.

A performance measurement system for public policies is based on the idea that the state is accountable for the results of its actions, which is based on, as Hood highlighted, a specific conception of public accountability which emerged from the 1980s, and which now prevails.⁴ This is what might be called the bedrock level of quantification: a quantification device, such as a performance indicator, is grounded in a founding vision, an ontology.⁵ It would be possible to go deeper and view this conception of public accountability as being rooted in a specific way of governing that might be called “government by objectives” (Thévenot, 2015).⁶
From these specific conceptions of governing and accountability, the French government made several choices. First, in probably a typically French way, a law (here the LOLF) was used to establish the system of performance management, using a standardized, centralized, top-down approach. Second, the LOLF speaks of “performance” and not of “results”. At the beginning of the 2000s, this was the choice made by many governments (such as the UK and the US), but not all (see Canada, for example). Whereas “results” can be seen as a quite a neutral word, the notion of “performance” carries many connotations (Jany-Catrice, 2016): ideas of outstanding qualities, of achievement (specifically in sports), of excellence, of winning; the notion of competition being not so far from them. Third, the LOLF chose to assess public performance only by means of quantitative indicators, relying on the belief that only numbers are able to report on public action and social reality, and, hence, demonstrating a “trust in numbers” (Porter, 1995).

A quantification device is thus the bearer of some great fundamentals: here, it implies a specific way of governing (government by objectives), a particular conception of public accountability, a standardized, centralized and top-down approach, a focus on performance, and a specific way of assessing public performance (via quantitative indicators) which is based on a belief in numbers.

## PERFORMANCE INDICATORS FOR FRENCH UNIVERSITIES: WHAT ARE THEIR RAISONS D'ÊTRE ?

The formulation of the first annual performance plans introduced by the LOLF involved designing a set of performance indicators. However, what is the “performance” of a public policy? What do we expect from a prison or from a school? What does a “well-performing university” do? Do we expect it to produce graduates adapted to the labour market and fitting the needs of private companies? Do we expect it to allow women and men from different social origins to attain the same levels of education? Do we expect it to produce a lot of patents that enhance the competitiveness of national companies? Do we expect it to broaden human knowledge? Do we expect it to provide a fulfilling and motivating working environment for its staff and students? Measuring the performance of a public institution is clearly built on a system of values, and it involves the making of fundamental, societal choices on what is important to measure.
In 2006, the first annual performance plan for higher education and research specified 33 indicators for universities with targets to be attained within five years. Where did these indicators, which French universities and the French Ministry of Education were accountable to Parliament for, come from? The LOLF could have been an opportunity for large democratic debate on the outputs and outcomes we expect from our public policies and public services. However, in my view, the LOLF was a missed opportunity for democracy, the choices of indicators were made in a completely technocratic way: they were the result of discussions and negotiations (from 2003 to 2005) between the ministry in charge of the public policy in question (here the Ministry of Education, Higher Education and Research, which I will refer to as the Ministry of Education), on the one hand, and the Treasury, on the other. Surprisingly, the discussions between the two ministries were not about the expected outcomes of higher education, but directly focussed on the indicators themselves: one ministry proposing certain indicators, which were then very often refused by the other.

To prevent the application of a “realist epistemology” to numbers, Desrosières suggested to talk not about “measurement” but about the “quantifying process”. As he put it:

> The use of the verb ‘to measure’ is misleading because it overshadows the conventions at the foundation of quantification. The verb ‘quantify’, in its transitive form (make into a number, put a figure on, numerize), presupposes that a series of prior equivalence conventions has been developed and made explicit [...]. Measurement, strictly understood, comes afterwards [...]. From this viewpoint, quantification splits into two moments: convention and measurement. (Desrosières 2008b, pp. 10–11)

In our case, that means that the ministries argued about measurements before agreeing on what the performance of higher education is. We can analyse these controversies through the interviews I conducted with officials of both ministries and try to understand the rationales of each.

For the Ministry of Education, the indicators served various objectives. Firstly, the Ministry conceived them as incentives for universities to act in a certain way. As a senior official in this Ministry put it:
There is a political will behind each indicator; we would like each indicator to be an incentive for universities to be better in a certain field or to develop in a certain way.

The indicators, then, are seen as signals.

Secondly, the Ministry thought about how the indicators could be used during its negotiations of the education budget with the Treasury. The Ministry proposed for example the following indicators: cost per student, student–teacher and student–administrative staff ratios, all of which are quite low in France compared to other OECD countries with similar GDP per inhabitant. These indicators would allow the Ministry to justify an increase of its budget, in particular in relation to staff numbers. Thirdly, the Ministry wanted to present a positive image of higher education. This can be seen in several interviews, where interviewees for example said:

> We're not masochists. You try to have indicators which can only improve; you do not want to be shot for it.

> We wanted to show what was working well.

In contrast, the Treasury's main concern was about its uses of the indicators during budgetary negotiations with ministries. It was very aware of their potential use as devices to justify the need of enhanced income and staff numbers. See, for example, the following comment from a senior Treasury official:

> We absolutely did not want indicators which allow our counterparts to say 'to get better results on this indicator, we need more money, more teachers, more premises, more computers or anything else'.

The Treasury refused, for this reason, nearly all the indicators that were put forward by the Ministry of Education. Contrary to the third objective of the Ministry of Education, indicators which presented a negative image of the Ministry to the public, which depreciated or undermined the value of its activities, would turn into a useful weapon for the Treasury. They allowed it to be in a stronger position to negotiate the education budget. Several quotations from the Ministry of Education showed that the Treasury was pressing for "negative" indicators:
The Treasury wanted to impose figures that you can find in tabloid headlines, such as failure rate, dropout rate and so on, a negative picture in fact.

The next section will show that the very limitations of the indicators were exploited in this struggle.

By analysing not only the controversies around the indicators but also the final indicators themselves, we can now try to make visible the value systems on which they are based. The works of Boltanski and Thévenot (2006 [1991]) and Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) are useful for that. To analyse disputes and controversies, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) identified seven “orders of worth” which imply systematic and coherent principles of evaluation, justification and legitimacy. Each of these “orders” (or “worlds”) gives importance to different values:

- The *inspired world* values imagination and creation.

- The *domestic world* values tradition, long-term relationships and the respect of hierarchies.

- The *fame world* values celebrity and public opinion.

- The *civic world* values collective interest, solidarity, equality and democracy.

- The *market world* values competition and the exchange of goods and services on a profit basis.

- The *industrial world* values efficiency, productivity and technical competences.

- The *projective world*, which features prominently in the *New Spirit of Capitalism* (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007), values flexibility, mobility, attractiveness and networks.

It is possible to link each of the indicators (some refer to teaching, some refer to research activities) of the annual performance plan for higher education to a specific world; only four of the above listed worlds are relevant for the purposes of our analysis. For each of these worlds, several topics and associated indicators can be identified. For the industrial world, for example: production volume (percentage of people with a university degree); production “failure” (non-completion rates); lead time (rate of PhD students defending their PhD thesis within three years); and efficiency (percentage of university building capacity in use). For the market world: revenues (percentage of revenues coming from intellectual
property rights); competitiveness (share of world scientific publications, percentage of patents deposited by universities); and inclusion in the labour market (employment rate of graduates three years after graduating). For the projective world: attractiveness (percentage of foreigners among masters, doctoral and postdoctoral students, and academics); visibility (two-year citation impact); and networks (rate of participation in European Framework Programmes). For the civic world: fairness (ratio between foreign and home students' success rates).⁷

In summary, as far as teaching is concerned, the industrial world (with eleven indicators) is dominant, whereas the projective (four indicators), market and civic worlds (three indicators each) are present but in much weaker form. Especially the indicators related to the civic world are quantitatively weak but also qualitatively poor: the indicators chosen do not send out a strong political signal, for example towards widening participation and democratizing higher education. With regards to the indicators for research, six of them can be linked to the market world and five to the projective world. It is ultimately a widely economics-based idea of performance that emerges from the chosen indicators, focussing on revenues, efficiency, competitiveness and insertion in the labour market. Some of the indicators, especially those related to research, also focus on attractiveness and networking, being thus closely akin to “knowledge economy” theories. On the other hand, the political and civic dimensions are not very pronounced at all.

## THE UPPER STRATUM: THE MICRO-CONVENTIONS OF CALCULATION

There is a large number of possible choices available at the most granular, even microscopic, level of each calculation. These choices have also been debated by the ministries. The Ministry of Education and the Conférence des Présidents d'Universités (CPU) [Association of University Presidents] often preferred indicators expressed in absolute terms, which they consider better for showing the high activity levels and social usefulness of higher education. The following excerpt from a letter from the CPU to the Secretary of Higher Education clearly illustrates this:

> Our general analysis of the indicators put forward [by the Treasury] is that several of them are disadvantageous, are negative for universities. While
French universities have to accept all the students who have passed the *baccalauréat*, they will be judged on qualitative criteria, such as success rates within a certain period of time (three years for undergraduates and PhD students for example). It is absolutely necessary that universities can also show quantitative results, such as the number (that is in absolute terms) of graduates they have trained.

By contrast, the Treasury systematically refused indicators expressed in absolute terms, and even refused their relative expression for a temporal analysis, such as growth rate. Let us consider, for instance, the indicator aiming to measure the objective of “Producing scientific knowledge at the best international level”. The two ministries struggled fiercely over it. The Ministry of Education promoted the number or the growth rate of French publications in internationally recognized journals, whereas the Treasury promoted the percentage of French publications in internationally recognized journals.⁸ The latter was finally chosen, so the Treasury won the battle on this indicator.

If we go back to the “orders of worth” analysis presented above, it is possible to regard the absolute measure as related to the industrial world, underlining production volume and the increase of this production volume; it is rooted in a productivity-based perspective. The relative measure can be seen as linked to the market world and being rooted in a market-based perspective, all the more so because the term “market share” is used in several speeches of Treasury officials, as well as many of the interviews I conducted with them. Furthermore, the latter choice allows comparisons between countries, and between universities or research centres. This choice, as Desrosières stated, “creates a new world in relation to which everyone has to position himself” (Desrosières, 2008b, p. 15); it makes benchmarking and ranking possible, and it makes it possible to put under pressure the universities or research centres which are at the bottom of the league (see also Dixon & Hood, 2016). As Ozga wrote: “Comparison defines the new mode of governance [...]. Comparison is war by other means” (Ozga, 2008, p. 268).

Even the limitations of the indicators can be used for this war, as a member of the Ministry of Education put it:

> The Treasury really put pressure on us to calculate some of the indicators in a certain way. For example, we had to fight really hard to make sure that the rate of PhD students defending their thesis within three years
should take into account students who have their viva before the 31st of December and not only before the beginning of the new academic year in September. This would change the result by more than 20 percentage points.⁹

The determination of the targets to be reached in the mid-term constitutes further evidence of this struggle between positive and negative pictures. The Ministry of Education wanted them to be set at an achievable level, the Treasury wanted them to be as high as possible. Furthermore, this negative picture tarnishes the image and perception of the public service in question in the eyes of MPs and in the eyes of the public. Indicators can then be used to justify reforms: this sector is doing badly, hence new policies are needed. For instance, the percentage of French publications in internationally recognized journals has been the most widely publicized indicator when talking about the quality of French research, fuelling alarmist discourses. Nicolas Sarkozy used this indicator in his speech of 22 January 2009 to legitimate the implementation of the Law on Liberty and Responsibility of Universities (the LRU) which was passed in 2007, but denounced by a great part of the French academia.

To sum up, the analysis of the construction process of the indicators picked up three elements: the indicators conceived as signals, the development of comparability and an economics-based idea of performance. This confirms Desrosières's (2008a) analysis. "Markets, incentives, benchmarks and rankings" have been, since the 1980s, "new and increasing features of public statistics" (Desrosières, 2008a, p. 112). But these indicators are only "loosely linked to each other" (Miller, 1992, p. 84). This way of developing quite an inconsistent set of indicators seems a specificity of NPM, considering that each field of social reality has its own dynamic separated from the others. In contrast, macroeconomic or national accounting aggregates are a very different kind of statistics, highly interconnected and based on a conception of the economy as a whole entity.

The analysis has also shown that a quantification device, such as a performance indicator, is the result, down to its smallest detail, of power struggles between the actors involved. Hence, "the moment of indicator design is a defining moment which will shape the future" (Desrosières, 2014, p. 47), and it is therefore a moment particularly important to analyse.
THE LIFE OF THE DEVICE: CONTEXT, USES AND DEVELOPMENTS

To understand the orientation of a quantification device and the effects it
can produce, the context of its deployment and its uses have also to be
examined.

2006-2012

The development of performance indicators is still at a relatively early
stage in France. We must remember that one of the main objectives of
the LOLF was to make the government and the public services more
accountable to parliament for the outcomes of their actions. The perfor-
mance indicators were supposed to be used by the MPs during the budget
debate. However, all the reports and speeches during the national budget
debates 10 were based on budget figures, describing the evolution of each
policy measure; and the discussions among MPs turned to the relevance
of these budget decisions. Performance indicators were not used at all in
these debates. Two reasons at least can explain that. Firstly, the LOLF did
not link performance to funding. As Lambert and Migaud, two MPs and
fathers of the LOLF, pointed out:

Managing a public entity is not the same as managing a company. For
the state, there is no direct link between the level of budget funds and
the objectives to be achieved. To decide the level of appropriations, the
notion of needs will remain the most important. It is thus possible that
achievements will have no budgetary impact. (Lambert & Migaud, 2006,
pp. 13–14)

Secondly, the indicators are rather meaningless for the MPs. They
are quite technical. Because of the objective of consistency, the indica-
tors have changed little since 2006, and the MPs, as was mentioned,
did not participate in their construction. MPs do not find the indicators
meaningful in relation to public policy making. Since they discuss policy
options and consider to be at the heart of political choices budgetary
decisions, they use budget figures. Furthermore, the budget debate is
conceived to be more of a debate between MPs from different polit-
ical parties, rather than an exchange between parliament and public
administration.
As shown above, within the government, the Treasury and the Ministry of Education anticipated, while negotiating the indicators, that these might be used during the budgetary negotiations. But the performance indicators were not used at that moment either; as a senior official from the Treasury put it:

> We were afraid that the different ministries would use the performance indicators to ask for an increased budget—that is the reason why we were so tough during the discussions about these indicators. But in fact, nobody uses them during the discussions of the ministries’ budgets; we speak about money, about staff, about policies, not about performance, neither them nor us.

The performance indicators were, in the end, not used in the two situations where they were expected to be used. However, they were going to be very powerful in a different, unexpected way. A French state reform, called the “General Revision of Public Policies” (RGPP), launched by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007 immediately after his election, initiated a new usage of them: performance indicators became tools for resource allocation from the Ministry of Education to universities. To make this understandable, we must briefly explain the history of the French university funding system as summarized in Table 9.1.

The new system of resource allocation, called “Sympa” (which can be translated as “cool”) resulted from discussions between the Department of Higher Education of the Ministry of Education, the parliament and the Conférence des Présidents d’Universités (CPU) [Association of University Presidents]. The system had two parts: one depending on activities (80%) and one depending on performance achievements (20%). Although, this does not seem to be a big change compared to the previous system, it actually was, as the newly introduced activities criterion had also a performance dimension. It is now no longer merely the number of students registered at the beginning of the year, but the number of students who sit the exams, and it is no longer the number of staff, but the number of “publishing academics” that counts (and non-publishing academics hamper the performance of their own university). If one incorporates this last criterion into the “performance share”, the share makes up more than 50% of the budget of most universities,¹¹ although it is the 80–20 ratio which has been taken up in the parliamentary reports and documents and speeches produced by the ministries and CPU.
<table><caption>**Table 9.1** French university funding system (from mid-1980s to 2012) (compiled by the author)</caption><thead><tr><th>Up to mid-1980s</th><th>From mid-1980s to 2008</th><th>From 2009 to 2012<br>(Sympa)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>100% block grant<sup>a</sup> based on:<br>- Number of students<br>- Number of administrative and academic Staff<br>- Surface area</td><td>70-80% block grant based on:<br>- Number of students<br>- Number of administrative and academic staff<br>- Surface area<br>20-30% contractual resources negotiated and based on projects</td><td>80% 'activity-based share' based on:<br>- Number of students sitting the exams<sup>b</sup><br>- Number of publishing academics<sup>c</sup><br>20% 'Performance Share' based on:<br>For Teaching:<br>- Undergraduate success rate<sup>d</sup><br>- Number of Master degrees delivered<sup>e</sup><br>For Research:<br>- Grades of university research centres (A+, A, B or C)<br>- Number of PhD degrees delivered</td></tr></tbody></table>

Although I have not examined the negotiations and controversies behind the production of the new resource allocation system, we can analyse its indicators. Some of these are derived from the LOLF, however, at least four different rationales can be noticed: first, a pure performance logic awarding good and bad marks (counting the number of publishing academics, awarding grades to research centres); second, an attempt to consider social and cultural inequalities (for example, by weighting the success rate by the grant holders' ratio)¹² driven by equity concerns; third,

<footnote><sup>a</sup>The tuition fees were very low (they are in fact more comparable to registration fees than to tuition fees); they were set by the Ministry of Education and were the same for all universities. They were taken off the block grant. The system remains the same today: annual tuition fees were around 300 euros for BA and MA degrees in 2020-2021</footnote>

<footnote><sup>b</sup>Subject to a weighting based on the field (exact sciences, natural sciences, social sciences and humanities) and the level (undergraduate or graduate) of the degree</footnote>

<footnote><sup>c</sup>Subject to a weighting based on the field: exact sciences (COEFF 2.5), natural sciences (COEFF 2.6) and social sciences and humanities (COEFF 2.0), and multiplied by the grade of the research centre: a publishing academic who works in an A+ unit is weighted 2.0, in an A unit 1.5, in a B unit 1.0 and in a C unit 0.5</footnote>

<footnote><sup>d</sup>Weighted by the grant holders' ratio</footnote>

<footnote><sup>e</sup>Subject to a weighting based on the field</footnote>
the acknowledgement of a university's activity (for instance the number of Master degrees and PhD degrees delivered, so an indicator in absolute terms as the CPU asked for the LOLF indicators); fourth, a weighting by fields, which is a remainder from the first resource allocation model (see also Table 9.1).

Quite technical and poorly publicized, the *Sympa* system received very little attention beyond the circles of the CPU, Ministry of Education and some well-informed MPs. These parties welcomed the new resource allocation system for several reasons. First, it was the result of negotiations in which these parties had been involved, and different rationales had been taken into account. Second, it was deemed to be an objective system based on clear criteria which replaced the 20–30% of contractual resources which previously had to be negotiated between a university’s management team and the Ministry. Third, besides its performance dimension, it was supposed to make visible inequalities existing between universities and, hence, could help address and reduce these. Fourth, parallel to the introduction of the new system, the government committed to a general increase of the higher education budget; so each university was supposed to benefit from *Sympa*, and under-resourced ones were supposed to benefit more.

However, it quickly became apparent that things should turn out very differently. The Ministry decided to increase the budget by far less than originally promised, and it also decided not to put the increase into *Sympa*'s envelope, but a separate “Undergraduate Success Programme” (*Plan Licence*), which should become a key measure for the government. In fact, the *Plan Licence* is still attached to the name of Valérie Pécresse, then Minister of Higher Education. The *Plan Licence* was allocated to each university without using the *Sympa*'s criteria, and through negotiations with each university. As a staff member of the Ministry of Education put it:

> Actually, the Ministry wanted to keep the power in its hands, at least what it thought was power; it wanted to have something on the table. And to be able to use it to encourage universities to apply voluntarily some new regulations (for example encourage them to merge). The result is: it was the tougher university president, the one with political support, the one who was president of an already well known university, etc. who earned the most.
Since the *Sympa*'s envelope remained steady, gains for some meant losses for others. The CPU, on the other hand, refused the notion of an "over-resourced" university and rejected any redeployment of resources between universities. Because of the decision of the Ministry and the position of the CPU,¹³ the possibility of reducing inequalities faded away, while the effects of *Sympa*'s performance dimension became quickly evident.

Performance is now financially rewarded, while non-performance is financially punished. In this context, having indicators which take into account the inputs or the conditions of teaching and research is very important. Performance can be linked with the academic level of the students, or with good working conditions, such as the number of administrative staff, which allows academics to do less administrative work and to have more time for research. In the same way, non-performance can be linked to "low" inputs and difficult working conditions, something which *Sympa*'s weighting tried to take into account, but now the punishment is only going to make worse.

Merton already revealed this phenomenon in the 1960s, and he called it the “Matthew effect” (Merton, 1968) referring to the following passage in the gospel of Matthew: “For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him” (*New Testament*, Matthew 25:29). We can also speak of “cumulative advantages”: a favourable relative position becomes a resource that produces further relative gains, so the rich get richer at a rate that makes the poor become relatively poorer. And the richest universities are generally the ones where most of the students come from privileged social backgrounds. So, performance-based financing, which is a frequent component of New Public Management, leads to a concentration of resources around those who already have the most,¹⁴ which has significant implications for our conceptions of equality and justice. Suleiman already noted in 2003 that a lot of the proposals coming from New Public Management theories “have little to do with bureaucracy in itself and much to do with the distribution of public resources” (Suleiman, 2003, p. 20). But often this political dimension is hidden: “The allocation of resources seems to result instead from the dynamism and the quality of individuals and institutions” (Le Galès & Scott, 2010, p. 132).

Generally speaking, this way of funding introduces competition between universities: once the total budget for higher education is
decided, the fact that some universities have financial rewards, and
so more money, naturally means that other universities will have less.
Competition takes place at the heart of performance-based financing
systems. Furthermore, these “*Sympa* indicators” have impacted univer-
sities’ policies. *Sympa’s* weighting pattern has indeed had an incentive
effect: an increase of five hundred students who pass their degree (for
the same number of students passing the exams) would generate an
additional budget of €80,000, while a 2.5% increase of the number of
publishing academics would mean an additional budget of €474,000.
In this context, a lot of universities chose to redirect financial and
human resources from teaching, not towards marketing, as Espeland and
Sauder (2007) observed for American Law Schools, but towards research.
Furthermore, it is advantageous for universities to recruit new academics
for research centres ranked A + or A, and not for the ones graded B or
C. Lastly, a lot of universities chose not to hire research officers, but to
recruit only university lecturers and professors, because the activity of the
former is made invisible by *Sympa*, although the potential lack of research
officers does not bode well for the development of science.

In addition, more and more universities decided to introduce a
performance-based resource allocation system internally, especially for
their research centres. They introduced a variable part for their budget,
for example 15%, based on performance indicators, such as the ratio of
publishing academics and the grade of the research centre (which is partly
based on the same ratio). But most often the management teams of the
research centres do not know anything about the criteria on which the
allocation of the remaining 85% is based. They are rather committed to
the variable component, arguing that at least here the criteria are known
and clear, and that it is a more transparent and fairer way of allocating
resources, not depending on personal relationships and lobbying. With
this system, they know what they have to improve and so they have the
feeling of being able to contribute to the sound management of public
money.

But, this link between performance and funding also produced what
can be called “punitive practices”: some research centres excluded the
non-publishing academics (to increase the ratio of publishing ones); some
decided not to pay for the costs when a non-publishing academic gave
a presentation at a conference. The presence of such practices depends
largely on the disciplines; they are quite rare in the social sciences but
quite common in economics and management,¹⁵ all the more so because the criteria used to decide whether one is publishing or non-publishing are, as will be discussed later, more strictly defined in economics and management than in the social sciences and the humanities.

This way of governing public services by financial incentives is really new in France. The relationships within the state and public services (and between them) are thought of in terms of microeconomic theory, specifically agency theory: “Society is viewed as a system of essentially self-interested ‘elementary particles’” (Supiot, 2015, p. 216); institutional and individual actors are thus thought of in terms of *homo economicus*, whose actions can be driven and controlled through a system of punishments and rewards. This is often the basis of management by objectives in the private sector and in the context of New Public Management. Vinokur (2008) summarized these changes when talking about a shift from the model of “obligation of means + trust” (the obligation of means resulting in a bureaucratic *ex ante* form of control, and the trust in job security for civil servants) to a model of “obligations of results + distrust”. We already highlighted the “low trust in public servants and professionals” when referring to Hood (1995, p. 94), which accompanied the rise of NPM and its new conception of accountability.

Finally, the performance indicators have widely replaced, within universities, the previous statistics they produced internally for a better understanding of their students. Performance indicators, and specifically those used by *Sympa*, became the dominant metrics compared to the statistics produced for acquiring knowledge about students’ characteristics. This trend, which can also be found in health care and the social services,¹⁶ is part of “the shift away from the social welfare state as guarantor of basic solidarities and rights, access and treatment for all, to the state as a provider of services” (Jany-Catrice, 2016, p. 129).

## Since 2012

In 2012, the resource allocation model of *Sympa* was abandoned by the new French government set up under the presidency of François Hollande. This demise has to be linked to several protests from students and academia from 2007 onwards. As mentioned before, the government, set up in May 2007 under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, had immediately passed a new law on Liberty and Responsibility of Universities
(the LRU Law).¹⁷ This law led to great protests, strikes and demonstrations, from 2007 to 2009. Initially, the protests were against the new law as a whole; later (in 2009), they partly focused on the new status introduced for university lecturers and professors by the new law, under the so-called “modulation des services”. Here, those who were classified as non-publishing might be given, by the president of their university, more teaching. Opponents to the reforms widely criticized the quantitative evaluation of the research centres and individuals, which led to centres being ranked and academics categorized as publishing or non-publishing.

The AERES (*Agence d'Évaluation de la Recherche et de l'Enseignement supérieur*), whose setting up in 2006 was already controversial, was in charge of these assessments. It developed, during the summer of 2008, the criteria that defined an academic as publishing or non-publishing, and it designed a ranking of scientific journals for each discipline: an academic was considered as publishing, if s/he had published two articles in a journal ranked A or B during the past four years. In the fall of 2008, many petitions emerged signed by academics, academic professional organizations and trade unions, scientific committees and editorial boards of academic journals; some of these petitions were against the ranking system, some against the priority given to publication in journals at the expense of other scientific activities (including the publishing of books), and some were against forms of quantitative evaluation all together. In response to these, in October 2008, the AERES allowed the academic disciplines themselves to identify a list of scientific journals without ranking them, and it made it possible to count books and book chapters as publications (at the discretion of the respective assessors). In 2009, AERES published new lists of journals, and while nearly all the social sciences and humanities decided not to rank the journals listed by them, economics and management studies did and still do so.

To bring the strike against the new status for lecturers and professors to an end, the government added that non-publishing academics might be given more teaching by the university president only if the academics concerned agreed. Critics of the ranking of research centres arose again a few years later, leading to new petitions in 2011. In response to all these protests, the Socialist Party committed during the presidential campaign (2012) to organize a National Conference on Higher Education and Research. François Hollande was elected, and the National Conference was held in November 2012. The previous system of assessment was, among other things, widely criticized during the Conference, and the
participants proposed that research centres should no longer be graded and ranked. A working group, comprising representatives of the Ministry and the CPU, was set up in April 2013 to re-examine the *Sympa* model. At the beginning of 2014, the AERES replaced the grades with a “textual appreciation” of research centres, which made *Sympa* obsolete. The working group was supposed to produce a new resource allocation model by the end of 2014, but the Ministry and the CPU did not manage to agree, and the working group stopped working in 2015.

From the above, four sticking points can be at least identified. First, the Ministry conceived *Sympa* as a decision-support tool, providing it with some room for manoeuvre and negotiations. In contrast, the CPU wanted the system to automatically calculate the budget of each university. Second, the Ministry would have liked to include the payroll in *Sympa*, but the CPU refused. Third, there was disagreement about the indicators themselves. The negotiating bodies seemed to agree on replacing the number of publishing academics by the number of academics, but they disagreed on the performance indicator for research that would replace the grades of research centres. The Ministry proposed two indicators, one measuring the participation in European Framework Programmes, and one based on the number or the percentage of *Institut Universitaire de France* laureates. The CPU questioned the method of calculation of the first and refused also the second arguing that it measured individual performance but did not evaluate the collective performance of a research centre or a university as a whole. Finally, a controversy about the weighting factors by field led to the conduct of a cost analysis of teaching and research in order to base the factors on objective information. As a result, the decision-making process on the budget allocated by the Ministry to each university became, contrary to what was initially intended, even less transparent.

## CONCLUSION

This chapter has traced the life of performance indicators in French higher education from their birth in the beginning of the 2000s to the end of the 2010s. Analytically, it distinguished between three levels that make up a quantification device, such as performance indicators: (a) the bedrock or the ontology of the device; (b) the intermediate level made up of the conceptions about the “*raisons d’être*” of the quantified entity; and (c) the upper stratum comprising the micro-conventions of calculation,
and it analyse the context in which the indicators were deployed. This study has shown how relevant it is to enter into the analysis of a specific field by decoding the genesis and uses of its quantification devices.¹⁸ As Salais has highlighted: “The choice of the indicators, the construction of data and their uses reveal the normative assumption of the policies” (Salais, 2004, p. 298). The three levels and the context are the result of socio-historical processes in which different social actors participate, bearing different philosophies or value systems. These processes can lead to great coherence between levels and context. But they can also lead to a weakly integrated device that exhibits many “gaps”. As Kurunmäki, Mennicken and Miller, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s works, put it: “The unity of such assemblages derives only from the co-functioning of their components; the relations that are formed among them” (Kurunmäki et al., 2016, p. 399). We can try now to capture the salient points of this assemblage.

This assemblage is based on the idea that the state is accountable for the results of its action, which is a specific conception of public accountability which emerged from the 1980s and which now prevails. The state chose to assess results by, and only by, quantitative indicators, which reveals a belief in numbers and a “realist epistemology”. From these starting points, this assemblage became economics-based and competition-oriented. Firstly, by choosing the vocabulary of “performance” (rather than the more neutral term “results”). “Performance” carries many connotations and introduces the notion of competition. Furthermore, the various negotiations between different parts of public administration led to a widely economics-based idea of performance focussed on revenues, efficiency, competitiveness, insertion into the labour market, attractiveness and networking, being thus closely akin to “knowledge economy” theories. On the other hand, political and civic dimensions of governing were almost absent. The chosen indicators and the way they are calculated made comparisons, benchmarking and ranking possible; they came to be conceived as signals towards universities. A performance-based financing system was implemented that introduced financial rewards and punishments, which was strengthened by some of the *Sympa* indicators, such as the number of publishing academics and the grades of the research centres. This system led to the production of “Matthew effects” and it introduced competition between universities. Because of *Sympa*'s weighting pattern, it encouraged universities to redirect financial and human resources from teaching towards research.
Together with the “*modulation des services*”, it made the development of punitive practices against individuals possible. This was a new way of governing public services in France: the relationships within the state and public services (and between them) became thought of in terms of microeconomic theory, and specifically within the framework of the agency theory; collective and individual actors were thought of in terms of *homo economicus*. All of these elements are quite coherent.

However, the LOLF did not, at its beginning, link performance to funding, thus there was no performance-based funding system at the national or ministerial levels. The indicators resulted from discussions and negotiations; they resulted from power dynamics and different strategies which introduced different logics. The present analysis has tried “to disen-tangle such multiplicities” (Kurunmäki et al., 2016, p. 397) of rationales. Aside from the competitive logic, there was also strong support for a transparent and automatic funding system that would be able to coun-teract nepotism and arbitrariness (and at the same time a refusal from the Ministry of such a transparent and automatic system). Porter (1995) and Supiot (2015) showed that quantification devices are also an essen-tial part of “government by rules” and of democracy. There was a strong demand for a funding system based on the needs of the universities, more than on their results; a well-informed MP, for example, welcomed in 2014 the change of indicator from the number of publishing academics to the number of academics. There was finally a will to take into account the social and cultural inequalities in order to reduce them.

Furthermore, several protest movements within academia have strongly criticized the rationale of competition, the quantitative mode of evalu-ation, the definition and use (*modulation des services*) of the status of “publishing academic”, the rankings of academic journals, the grading of research centres and the punishing practices. These movements were victorious in some respect: the *modulation des services* is now only possible if the non-publishing academic agrees with the ruling; the grades for research centres have been abolished; the publication of books and book chapters can be taken into account for the social sciences and humanities; and journals are no longer ranked in these disciplines. These alterations have reduced the impact of the competitive and punitive dimensions of the device and explain why, together with the tenure and status of “*fonctionnaire*” for the great majority of academics,¹⁹ it has become, at least in the social sciences and humanities, a very limited “engine of anxiety” (Espeland & Sauder, 2016).
In summary, the reforms studied here, and the quantification devices implied, do not form a very integrated assemblage. This explains why the changes that the performance indicators were supposed to help bring about were at the same time significant and limited, in comparison with what may have occurred in the UK higher education system for example (see also Eyraud, 2016).

The three-part analytical distinction introduced in this chapter, combined with an analysis of the context in which a quantification device, such as a performance indicator, is deployed, makes visible the very broad range of possible options. One can agree with the idea that the state and the public services must be accountable to citizens, regarding it as a significant democratic progress. But this does not mean that only numbers are able to report on public action and social reality; being accountable is not just about reporting numbers. As Supiot pointed out: "To confuse measurement and assessment inevitably dooms us to lose our sense of proportion; assessment is not only measurement; assessment requires that the measurement is referred to a value-based judgement which gives it meaning" (Supiot, 2010, p. 82). De Gaulejac went even further: "We should abandon the economist, objectivist and mathematical conception of assessment and adopt a qualitative, democratic and dynamic one" (De Gaulejac, 2012, p. 77). Indeed, the very idea of measuring performance by indicators should be questioned, since there may exist other preferable ways of assessing public services.

However, even if quantitative evaluation should not be the only way, quantitative indicators can be useful in the process. In that case, the starting point, from which the indicators emerge, should be a wide-ranging public debate on what is expected from public policies. As Gadrey (1996) proposed, Boltanski and Thévenot's (2006) "orders of worth" can help to specify the different expectations placed on indicators. Furthermore, detailed definitions of the indicators should not be a way of surreptitiously encapsulating values and hierarchies. These micro-conventions of calculation should be drawn up with an aim of impartiality, and when a choice is needed it should be made democratically in order to construct what could be called a "shared objectivity". Finally, the uses of the indicators should also be carefully scrutinized and debated. The decision to base funding on performance indicators has powerful effects, such as an increase in inequality. The analytical grid proposed here provides a blueprint for building "what should be, in our view, a satisfying process of quantification" (Salais, 2016, p. 133).²⁰
NOTES

1. I use the term “device” referring to Foucault’s concept of “dispositif”. Foucault defines dispositif as “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid (...). The dispositif itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements” (Foucault, 1994, p. 299). The term thus emphasizes the complex and varied nature and the systemic dimension of these “ensembles”. I have chosen to use the notion of “device”, even if the English translation of Foucault’s “dispositive” has given rise to extensive discussions. Some of the published translations retain the term in French; others opt for various solutions such as “apparatus”, “device”, “arrangement”, etc.

2. In 2006, the French state moved from a specific public accounting system to a business accounting system.

3. This concept refers to Espeland and Sauder's work. They define “reactivity” as “the idea that people change their behaviour in reaction to being evaluated, observed or measured. [...] Because people are reflexive beings who continually monitor and interpret the world and adjust their actions accordingly, measures are reactive” (Espeland & Sauder, 2007, pp. 1–2). Desrosières has also insisted on this aspect of quantification throughout his work (see for example, Desrosières, 2008b, p. 12).

4. In the same vein, Miller (1990) demonstrated the interrelation between accounting and the state, and Desrosières showed that there is a degree of congruence between modes of governance, conceptions of the state and statistical tools (Desrosières, 2014, pp. 33–58).

5. Miller and Rose (1990; 1992) used the notion of “programme”.

6. It would be possible to go even deeper into the roots of Western civilization and the way it conceived government (Supiot, 2015).

7. A table which groups the various indicators into the different orders of worth can be found in Eyraud (2014, p. 81).

8. We can note here that even if the two ministries did not agree on the way of calculation, they implicitly agreed on the principle that scientific production had to be measured by, and only by, publications in academic journals.

9. In France, the great majority of PhD vivas take place from October to December. This quotation also shows the absolute need, if one wants to understand statistical figures, to go into the details of definitions, delimitations and methods of calculation (Eyraud, 2008). It is one of the reasons why international comparisons using statistical data are so difficult to handle properly.
10. I have followed the budget debates for higher education on the parlia-
mentary channel each year since 2007, and, on that matter, there is no
change even after 2012.

11. The calculation can be made using the universities' *Sympa* data sheets, which I managed to get hold of for two universities.

12. Grants are allocated based on means-testing parental incomes. The idea behind is that scholarship students are the ones with low cultural capital, thus, with a lowest probability of success which has to be taken into account in the performance measurement of a specific university.

13. Neither the Ministry of Higher Education nor the CPU are homogeneous organizations. These were decisions and positions that had to be won inside these organizations.

14. This process is reinforced by the different “policies of excellence” launched since 2010 and their competitive funding arrangements.

15. I did not conduct any interviews within natural science research centres.

16. But not in all domains. Dubet showed, for example, that quite a similar way of governing French secondary schools pushed them to produce social data on their pupils to justify their choices and to obtain additional resources (Dubet, 2016, p. 387). Statistics produced for acquiring knowledge about pupils existed before, but only at the national level, not at the school level.

17. To understand more about the law and the protests, one can read in French Vinokur (2008) and in English Briggs (2009). The English page of Wikipedia is also quite informative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9309_university_protests_in_France, accessed 15 September 2019.

18. Even if it does not provide a complete analysis of the field, because some of its characteristics and transformations are beyond the scope of the quantification devices. For a comprehensive understanding of the recent transformations of French higher education, one should integrate at least the severe budgetary constraints with which the universities are confronted (Henry & Sinigaglia, 2014; Sinigaglia, 2018), the different “policies of excellence”, the policy of university grouping and merging, and the change of universities legal status (Eyraud, 2020).

19. The situation is different for casual workers, especially for the young generation. The LRU introduced the possibility to recruit “casual lecturers”, but a lot of academics, academic organizations and trade-unions opposed it, so few governing boards of universities decided to hire people under this new status. Things may change quickly as a result of a new law, the “Loi de Programmation de la Recherche” (LPR) passed in December 2020.

20. I develop this idea further with several concrete examples in Eyraud (2019).
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Voicing for Democracy
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# Quantification = Economization? Numbers, Ratings and Rankings in the Prison Service of England and Wales

Andrei Guter-Sandu and Andrea Mennicken

Since the late 1980s, the HM Prison Service in England and Wales has undertaken a series of steps to transform its prison establishments into calculating, economically minded, performance-oriented institutions. This happened in the broader context of wider New Public Management reforms (Hood 1991, 1995). Of particular importance, in this context, was the government's engagement in prison privatization and the introduction of private sector accounting and management consulting expertise (Mennicken, 2013). The government hoped that the introduction of private prisons would help to “provide an alternative standard against which to measure the performance of public prisons, thereby bringing about improvements in the public sector” (James et al., 1997,

<footnote>A. Guter-Sandu (✉) · A. Mennicken
Department of Accounting and Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
e-mail: a.guter-sandu@lse.ac.uk</footnote>

<footnote>A. Mennicken
e-mail: a.m.mennicken@lse.ac.uk</footnote>
p. 9). Privatization was promoted to transform prison establishments from inflexible, inefficient, rules-based bureaucratic organizations to cost-conscious, performance-oriented entities. The rise and spread of standardized performance measures paralleled these developments. Quantified performance targets were introduced to make public and private prison performance outcomes more visible and transparent and to enhance competitiveness amongst individual establishments (Ministry of Justice, 2009, but see also Home Office, 1988, 2000).

This chapter uses the case of prison privatization in England and Wales to scrutinize what it means to “economize the social” through numbers. By economizing we refer to the processes through which individuals, activities and organizations are constituted or framed as economic actors and entities (Çalışkan & Callon, 2009; Miller & Power 2013). Emphasis is placed on the process by which a supremacy of the economic over society, including politics and domestic life, is articulated and established (Miller & Power, 2013). Economizing defined in such broad terms has many components: First and foremost, “it implies a concern with the idea of efficiency – governing aimed at enhancing individual or collective performance, the reduction of wastefulness, and the imposition of rationing through calculation” (Kurunmäki et al., 2016, p. 396). Economizing also encompasses the creation and expansion of markets, and an enhanced focus on competition to improve performance (Çalışkan & Callon, 2010; Davies, 2014). Lastly, financialization, understood as the rise and expansion of financial markets, financial expertise and (capital) investment rationales, can be seen as a variant of economization (Mennicken & Espeland 2019, p. 234). In this context, French scholars in particular have drawn attention to the processes whereby things (e.g. higher education) or human beings (e.g. prisoners) are turned into assets evaluated in their capacity to create value from the perspective of an investor who expects calculable future returns (Chiapello, 2015; Muniesa et al., 2017).

Quantification undergirds all these processes of economization. Quantification and commensuration are key conditions for economic calculation and action (Mennicken & Espeland 2019). Cost accounting, such as the National Reference Cost Index for NHS hospitals or the calculation of prison unit costs, for instance, helps instantiate ideas of efficiency and frugality at the heart of hospital care and the management of prison establishments. Ratings and rankings (e.g. of organizational entities such as universities or prisons) enable benchmarking and the stimulation of
competition (e.g. between universities), and are often closely linked with
the establishment of (quasi)markets in the public services. Furthermore,
especially over the past fifteen years or so, we have seen an increase in
quantified social impact assessments, such as social return on investment
figures, aimed at making the value of charity and public sector work know-
able and visible from an investor's perspective (Barman, 2016; Hall et al.,
2015).

In the following, we scrutinize the multiplicity of such quantification
practices and their implication in different processes of economization
in the Prison Service of England and Wales. First, we show how prison
privatization in the 1990s was accompanied by a rise of prison perfor-
mance metrics, rankings and ratings aimed at facilitating a shift from
“governing by rules” to “governance by numbers” (Miller 2001; Supiot
2015). We observe a market-oriented utilization of quantification, aimed
at stimulating competition amongst and between public and private
prison providers. Next, we turn to attempts aimed at undoing such
economization. We trace efforts of “moralizing” prison performance
metrics through the development of measures of the quality of prison life
(Liebling, 2004). We show how such moralizing quantification eventu-
ally came to be undermined by austerity policies and related economizing
practices of curtailment and frugality. Lastly, we discuss the implication of
prison quantification in processes of financialization and (capital) invest-
ment rationales, focusing on the introduction (and abolishment) of the
world’s first social impact bond in Peterborough prison.

We argue that to uncover the multiple effects of economization and
quantification brought about by market-oriented new public management
reforms and prison privatization, one needs to set presumed dichotomies
between the public and the private aside and turn instead to the multi-
plicity of economizing practices (here: curtailing, marketizing, financial-
izing) and their implication in different forms of quantification. Ironically,
in the case of England and Wales, numbers and state contracts governing
privately managed prisons also shielded these establishments from econ-
omization (e.g. budgetary savings requests); and it is the public prisons
that have been exposed the most to measures of government austerity.

Furthermore, we need to be careful not to equate quantification with
economization. Although quantification is an important condition for
economization, it is only recently that quantification has been largely
annexed by the phenomenon dubbed neoliberalism (Kurunmäki et al.,
2016). We call for greater attention to the complex interplays unfolding
between different practices of quantifying and economizing. In so doing, we also argue for closer scrutiny of the conditionality of the performa- tivity of quantification (Butler, 2010; Kurunmäki et al., 2016). We need to pay closer attention to the conditions under which numbers produce (economizing and other) effects, and we need to better understand the varying nature and extent of those effects.

## QUANTIFYING AND MARKETIZING: PRISON PRIVATIZATION, QUANTIFICATION AND THE ETHOS OF CONTESTABILITY

Since the 1980s, public services in the UK have undergone a series of far-reaching reforms. Instead of state coordination, market competition came to be seen as an effective lever for driving efficiency and innova- tion (Hood 1991; Miller & Rose 1990; Pollitt, 1993).¹ The reforms, labelled “New Public Management” by scholars (see, e.g., Hood, 1991), were based on a conception of accountability that, as Hood (1995, p. 94) writes, reflected high trust in the market and private business methods, and low trust in public servants and professionals. New Public Manage- ment ideas also took hold in the Prison Service (Bennett et al., 2008; Bryans, 2007; Coyle, 2005; Coyle et al., 2003; Liebling, 2004; Liebling et al., 2011), providing fertile ground for plans of prison privatization. It was assumed that selective privatizations and the threat of market testing public prisons, where the HM Prison Service had to bid against private prison providers for the running of its own prison establishments, would stimulate the development of a “business culture” (Black, 1993) and “yield cross-fertilization benefits” (Harding, 2001). “The market” was called upon to discipline public prison administrators, financially and operationally (see, e.g., Home Office, 1988 and the introductory quote). Competition between and amongst public and private prison providers should help drive down costs (e.g. costs connected to the running of prison establishments), increase quality (e.g. the quality of prison life) and effectiveness (e.g. the effectiveness of operational procedures).

The first private prison establishment was opened in England and Wales in 1992 (Wolds Remand Prison, which was a newly built prison) (James et al., 1997). In the same year, the first public prison (Strange- ways Prison) was also market tested (Prison Reform Trust, 1994). Market testing permitted the private sector to compete directly with the public
sector for the management of prisons that were considered to be “failing”,
that were not meeting performance targets, for instance with respect to
cost management or security standards, evidenced for example by prisoner
escapes or riots. As Black notes:

> Market testing within the Prison Service will be twofold: First, under the provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 1991, the Prison Service will have to compete with the total privatization of certain prison establishments. [...] Internal services currently run by the Prison Service are also to be contracted out, both to the public and private sectors. This is the second tier of market testing. [...] In the open market, an agency status Prison Service will have to bid with other competitive tenders in order to run its own existing establishments, under certain proscribed conditions. (Black, 1993, pp. 27–30)

The introduction of market testing and privatization coincided with an “institutional crisis” in the Prison Service (King & McDermott, 1989; Resodihardjo, 2009). Between 1980 and 1987, prison expenditure had increased in real terms by 72% (James et al., 1997, p. 48). The overcrowding of prisons had become a serious issue. By 1990, England alone was imprisoning more people than any other Western European country (Pozen, 2003, p. 263). In the early 1980s, a third of the offenders in custody were sharing with one or two others cells designed for only one person and, in June 1989, Wadsworth prison in London had only eight cells with access to sanitation at night versus 1149 without access (ibid.). Furthermore, in 1990 the Prison Service experienced a series of severe prison riots. The riots had started in Strangeways Prison in April 1990, and spread thereafter to more than 20 prisons throughout the country. As Resodihardjo (2009, p. 93) writes, for Great Britain, these were “the most serious series of riots ever experienced… When the quiet returned, three people had died, 133 inmates and 282 prison staff had been injured and there [sic] the cost of the damage ran into millions of pounds”.

In view of these issues, and the lobbying efforts of the security industry, neoliberal think tanks and the general preference of the Thatcher government for free enterprise, prison privatization and market testing were put forward as solutions to the various problems facing the Prison Service, despite fierce opposition from the entire British penal lobby and the Labour Party. From 1992 onwards, the Prison Service began to be reorganized in terms of a “mixed economy”, with a mix of public and
private prison service providers (King & McDermott, 1995). And by the late 1990s the debate had shifted from whether the government should principally allow private prisons or not to how it could best govern them, including the assessment of the efficacy and effects of privatization schemes (National Audit Office, 2003; Pozen, 2003).

In these reforms, a key role came to be assigned to quantification and “auditability” in terms of numbers (Power 1997). Standardized performance metrics should help make prison performance visible and governable across public and private prison establishments. These quantification tools were supposed to turn prisons into competitive, market-oriented “accounting entities” (Kurunmäki, 1999). Whereas in the 1970s in the Prison Service, and in the public services more generally, corporate planning had been the main mechanism through which central oversight was exercised, in the late 1980s, this began to change, and policy-makers turned to ideas of market coordination.

Market-oriented quantification, via accrual-based accounting, performance measurement and prison ratings, should facilitate an extension of the rationality of the market to the Prison Service, and public administration more generally, domains previously viewed as non-market and non-economic (Davies, 2014; Kurunmäki et al., 2016). Quantification thus became implicated, as Foucault put it, in a much broader process of governmental reform, characterized by the transformation “from a market supervised by the state to a state under the supervision of the market” (Foucault, 2008, p. 116) (see also Bruno & Didier, 2013; Miller & Rose, 2008; Supiot 2012, 2015; Rose & Miller, 1992; Davies, 2014).

The first set of standardized performance metrics was introduced into the Prison Service in 1992–93 by Derek Lewis, the Prison Service's first chief executive who was recruited from the private sector. These metrics included, amongst other things, the number of prisoner escapes, the number of assaults (on staff, prisoners and others), the number of hours spend in purposeful activity, the proportion of prisoners held in unit of accommodation intended for fewer numbers, the proportion of prisoners held in prisons where prisoners are unlocked on weekdays for a total of at least 12 hours and information about the average cost per prisoner place (Prison Reform Trust, 1996). In subsequent years, the number of prison Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) steadily increased from 8 to 18 in 2000–01 (Liebling, 2004, pp. 58–63), to 28 for the newly created National Offender Management Service Agency (NOMS) in 2008–09 (joining up the prison and probation services).
These KPIs included public protection measures (measured in number of escapes), Offending Behaviour Program (OBP) completions, OBP starts, number of completed drug rehabilitation programmes, drug testing results, employment of prisoners upon release, accommodation of prisoners upon release, number of serious assaults, overcrowding data (target: number of prisoners held in accommodation units intended for fewer prisoners does not exceed 26% of the population), staff sickness, race equality data (target: at least 6.3% of prison staff should be from ethnic minority groups), costs per prisoner place and audit compliance (NOMS, 2009, pp. 18–19).

In 2003, such quantifications were given a further boost by the introduction of benchmarking and composite performance ratings. The benchmarking and rating programmes were introduced following Lord Carter's correctional review in which he called for the establishment of the principle of “contestability” within the HM Prison Service (Carter, 2003; Home Office, 2004). According to Nellis (2006, p. 53), Carter's review exemplified “the messianic managerialism”—the re-engineering of existing structures and functions to produce “guaranteed”, quantifiable and externally verifiable behavioural outcomes—that had come to characterize New Labour's approach to modernization (see also Pollitt, 1993; Power, 1997). From 2003, prison performance measures of safety, security, rehabilitation and economic efficiency came to be put together in a weighted scorecard, drawn up in the fashion of Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan & Norton, 1992), on the basis of which composite performance ratings are drawn up, similar to the “star ratings” of the NHS. Public and private prisons are rated and compared on a 1 to 4 performance scale. Level 4 is awarded to excellent establishments that are delivering “exceptionally high performance”. Level 1 indicates a “poor performer”. Since the introduction of the ratings, according to a study by Bryans (2007), prison governors find themselves operating in a “more competitive” and “less collegiate” world; “more than ever before, their focus is on how prisons are performing relative to other similar prisons” (Bryans, 2007, p. 74) (see also Bennett et al., 2008).

Underlying the introduction of the prison ratings was a belief in the power of market incentives, and the aspiration to govern through competition (Mehrpouya & Samiolo, 2016). As Bryans (2007, p. 73) writes, with the help of the ratings poorly performing prisons were publicly identified and given six months in which to improve their performance. A failure to improve meant that the prison faced the threat of closure or