NUPI project to receive prestigious European Research Council funding

‘Like coming home from the Winter Olympics without any gold medals’, was how the education minister described Norway’s middling performance in the OECD’s inaugural Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Those words would catalyse a decade of education reform aimed at improving Norway’s PISA rank.

Norway’s response to PISA was far from unusual: 'PISA shocks' rippled through the OECD in 2001, as one country after another reckoned with a lower-than-expected position. Yet, PISA shocks constitute just one example of a still broader trend in global governance: towards using Country Performance Indicators (CPIs) to prod and pressure governments into reform.

‘Groundbreaking potential’

These CPIs and the politics surrounding them are what Senior Research Fellow Paul Beaumont and his team will set out to examine in the research project Navigator. The project will receive 1.5m Euro from the European Research Council (ERC) to conduct their research.

‘On behalf of NUPI, I am very proud to announce that Paul has won an ERC Starting Grant. The sole criterion for a Starting Grant is academic excellence, and the panel that evaluated Paul's application wrote that his planned research has groundbreaking potential. I look forward to following how the research project progresses,’ said NUPI’s Director Kari Osland.

The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the award of 494 Starting Grants to early career scholars across Europe. Only 14 projects across all disciplines in Norway will receive this funding.

Rapid growth of quantified performance indicators

States are now measured and ranked on a dizzying array of cross-cutting metrics: As Beaumonts explains, like it or not, CPI’s are omnipresent in global governance: ‘From Corruption indexes, to human development, from the credit rating agencies to the OECD’s (in)famous PISA education rankings, one would need to be living on the moon to escape the gaze and influence of CPIs in the 21^st century.’

‘The project explores how users and producers of country performance indicators navigate the “era of indicators” in global governance, which is characterised by the rapid growth of quantified performance indicators across all major policy fields,’ says Beaumont. 

Navigator will explore when, why, and how CPI users in the government, media, civil society use, or have learned to use, CPIs with caution and proven capable of absorbing information about their limitations and changing their usage patterns accordingly. 

The project’s focus extends beyond policy makers because it is widely established that CPIs exert social pressure via third party audiences in the media and civil society.  In short, Beaumont says that Navigator will explore how users and producers of indicators ‘deal with the diversity of indicators in a given policy field and whether and when they learn in light of criticism’.

The “seduction of quantification”

‘Norway, along with most countries in the world, has embraced the era of quantified performance indicators at every level of society, within both the private and public sectors. CPIs are useful because they enable politicians, citizens and civil society to compare Norway to other countries, and thereby help improve the accountability of public administration and in theory, catalyse policy improvements.

Yet, he points out, a growing body of research shows how overreliance upon international indicators generates new risks for society:

‘The “seduction of quantification” lies in the illusion that it can render complexity into simplicity and not lose something crucial along the way. Corona highlights this danger only too well. The United States ranked top in several leading CPIs that claimed to measure preparedness for a pandemic, yet for several unforeseen reasons the American response to Corona was among the worst in the developed world. Clearly these CPIs’ measure of preparedness overlooked something important, which only became apparent once it was too late.’

Unhealthy PISA ranking obsession

Sowhat can Norway and other states learn from this?

‘An overreliance upon CPIs can breed complacency and lead to myopia. This is at best inefficient and possibly dangerous. As Norway’s unhealthy obsession with PISA rankings in the 2000s illustrates, it is certainly not immune to these pathologies.’

While Navigator will dedicate one work package to exploring the use of CPIs in the education policy field, the project will also delve into user-practices across three other policy fields with clear relevance to Norway: good governance, climate policy and global health

Beaumont explains that the project has been in development for several years following several near misses with the Research Council of Norway (RCN).

 ‘As a result, it has been revised and refined multiple times and so I am thrilled that the work paid off. Without endorsing the competition, I am personally delighted that a panel of my peers – from IR, International Law, and Political Science – believe that Navigator merited funding. I am really looking forward to having a sustained period of research time – 5 years – to work on what I firmly believe is a crucial issue for Norway and international society’.

He also stresses that he is extremely grateful for the support he’s had through the project development process:

‘The Navigator project idea benefited from the generous support from numerous friends and colleagues inside and outside NUPI, including insightful and extensive feedback from many who were “competing” for the same prize. Meanwhile, both the new and the old leadership at NUPI saw potential in the project and encouraged me to stick with it even after several unsuccessful submissions.’

Research Director Kristin Haugevik describes Paul as a highly appreciated colleague at NUPI

‘Those of us who have followed his many academic achievements are not surprised that he has now achieved this as well. His ERC project is in many ways a classic NUPI project, combining theory development and critical thinking with hands-on practical research and empirical analysis. I look forward to seeing it develop,’ she says.

To avoid any confusion, please note that this is not the same project as a different EU funded project at NUPI, which shares the abbreviated title Navigator, but studies the EU and multilateral cooperation.