This article goes beyond the presentation, assessment and discussion of the Berggruen Governance Index by suggesting potential next steps for governance indicators and relevant data systems more generally. Specifically, it addresses four ways to advance research on governance performance. The first two, greater cross-validation and cross-fertilisation and a systematic assessment of the legal-regulatory context, address the two major challenges of current research, namely the weak connection between the theoretical understanding of governance and the current stock of indicators as well as the tenuous connection between conceptually grounded indices on the one hand and the needs of policymakers to have actionable results on the other. The other two proposals, that is the development of governance operationalisations based on network structures and the notion of planetary governance, suggest transcending the current nation-state and variable-based frame for governance indices towards actor-based indicators and dashboards.
Photo by Tim Mossholder