Whose Best Practices? The Significance of Context in and for Transnational Criminal Justice Indicators

Abstract

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 indicators, 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.