Whose Best Practices? The Significance of Context in and for Transnational Criminal Justice Indicators
| Published date | 01 October 2019 |
| Author | David Nelken |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12182 |
| Date | 01 October 2019 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 46, ISSUE S1, OCTOBER 2019
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. S31±S50
Whose Best Practices? The Significance of Context in and
for Transnational Criminal Justice Indicators
David Nelken*
To what extent is it possible to identify transnational good or best
practice and what are the difficulties and challenges in doing so
validly? The claim made in this article is that it may be helpful to
examine the spread of global social indicators as a series of projects
that themselves reproduce ideas of what counts as `good' practice.
This will help identify the `politics of comparison' in each case. Taking
as an example recent calls for criminologists to engage with the global
targets for change set by the United Nations, the article discusses the
aims of comparison, the uses of indi cators, and the way that
commensuration misrepresents contexts in the drive to evaluate local
conditions in terms of overarching standards. It then revisits the debate
concerning the so-called knowledge and governance `effects' of global
social indicators.
[T]o change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.
1
The questions posed by the editors of this Special Supplement include the
following:
If transfers of policy and practice can sometimes be desirable, what part can or
should cross-cultural research play in defining good transnational practice and
assessing the consequences, both good and bad, of transfer? What kinds of
comparative research might be appropriate to the task? To what extent is it
desirable to seek to identify transnational good or best practice? What are the
difficulties and challenges in doing so validly?
2
S31
*Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College, Strand, London WC2R 2LS,
England
david.nelken@kcl.ac.uk
1 J. Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1991) 138.
2 This article is a much revised version of a paper called `Best practice in security and
justice: from cross-cultural description and explanation to transnational prescription?'
presented at the Cardiff workshop on `Learning from Elsewhere', 15±16 May 2017.
ß2019 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2019 Cardiff University Law School
The claim to be made here is that some light may be thrown on these difficult
issues also by starting the other way round, by examining the spread of so-
called global social indicators as a series of projects that themselves pre-
suppose and serve to produce what counts as `good' practice.
To appreciate how what come to be defined as best practices are con-
structed, we need to understand the type of comparisons that these projects
rely on. Studying the role of comparison in global indicators in this way is an
example of what can be called `second-order' comparison where the aim is
less to engage in comparison directly than to study comparisons as a social
practice engaged in by others.
3
It involves studying the way individuals,
agencies and organizations actually go about comparing. It asks what claims
± whether true or not
4
± are made about what goes on in other places so as to
understand when, where, and why descriptions and evaluations are found
plausible and what consequences follow. Those following this approach
focus less on the eventual effects of indicators than on the sites of formula-
tion, use, and resistance to indicators, in places such as committee rooms or
offices, typically far from the sites where the data is collected. They seek to
understand the `politics of comparison' for those comparing and those being
compared.
The article begins by describing the increasing attention being paid by
comparative criminal justice scholars to processes of legal and policy
transfers and the spreading of global prescriptions, and notes the call for
criminologists to support and criticize the recent global targets set by the
United Nations in the field of criminal justice. It goes on to distinguish the
goals of different kinds of comparisons, and shows the way different pur-
poses shape the use of indicators and the importance given to understanding
the contexts being compared. Crucially, it argues that those engaged in
exercises of transnational ranking and target setting may often be more
interested in changing contexts than in understanding them. The article then
revisits the debate concerning the so-called knowledge and governance
`effects' of social indicators so as to discuss the implications these have for
efforts to pursue global projects of social improvement.
S32
3 For previous efforts to develop this argument, see D. Nelken, `The changing roles of
social indicators: from explanation to governance' in Globalisation, Criminal Law
and Criminal Justice: Theoretical, Comparative and Transnational Perspectives, eds.
P. Alldridge et al. (2015) 25±44; and D. Nelken, `From pains-taking to pains-giving
comparisons' (2016) 12 International J. of Law in Context 390.
4 See, for example, the views of Polish prosecutors concerning decision making by
their colleagues in Western Europe cited in P. Polak and D. Nelken, `Polish Prose-
cutors, Corruption, and Legal Culture' in Central and Eastern Europe After Transi-
tion: Towards a New Socio-legal Semantics, eds. A. Febbrajo and W. Sadurski (2010)
219.
ß2019 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2019 Cardiff University Law School
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