ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the knowledge environment and the role of secretariats in shaping the impact of measurement on institutions by tracing several cases of measurement development: the Human Development Index (HDI) which developed in the United Nations Development Program, the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) of the World Bank. The HDI has transformed development efforts in a wide variety of organizations, the greenhouse gas inventories have spurred myriad efforts at carbon counting, and the WGI have not been widely applied. While the HDI is an agenda-setting effort designed to bridge between scholarship on development and policy formulation, the WGI serve primarily as an evidentiary tool for World Bank efforts to apply the “good governance” hypothesis to lending policy. The impact of the WGI on governments’ policies or institution building has been limited. The secretariat of the World Bank was under significant constraint during the initial development of the WGI.
