The dominance of International Organisations (IOs) in the production of global metrics has not only penetrated the transnational social and policy fields; numbers have become an integral part of the fabric of International Organisations themselves. However, amidst avid critics and unapologetic fans, surprisingly little is known about the ways in which global processes of quantification are reconfiguring the field. Metrics have infiltrated not only organisational cultures and the environments these organisations inhabit; crucially, they are reshaping the ways International Organisations co-exist, compete and survive in an increasingly quantified, yet uncertain world. Recent decades have seen fervent activity by International Organisations to build working collaborations and broad alliances for finding ‘global solutions’ to ‘global crises’. Financial investment in these collaborations is increasing and so is hope: If only we had known, we could have acted. Given the moral dimension that these new indices of progress have taken, as well as the enormous human and environmental cost of their failures, there is now urgent need to examine the interplay of International Organisations in producing quantification for European and transnational governance.

Building on International Relations (IR) theory, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and using theoretical perspectives from Organisational Sociology, as well as the newly emerging field of the social studies of metrics, this paper will theorise on the interrelationships of International Organisations (IOs) in co-constructing the global metrological field. European and global education governance will be the focal cases for this examination: IOs have been central to processes of standardisation, de-contextualisation and performance management through numbers; as a result, they have been instrumental in commensurating, and therefore transforming the policy field. In addition, education is increasingly considered central to economic prosperity and social cohesion. Thus, it is a productive arena to examine how quantification impacts on the ways IOs reconfigure their governing work.

This is a novel, problem-driven perspective that goes beyond the role of IOs in ‘governing by numbers’: instead, the paper brings  together multiple bodies of knowledge in order to cast light on the role metrics play in re-shaping the relationships between the data collectors themselves. The paper is innovative in two important ways: first, although there have been some in-depth studies of the impact of measurement on reforms in various policy fields, little attention has been paid to those early, yet crucial, venues, actors and activities that determine processes of problematisation (the construction of the ‘problem’) and institutionalisation (the moment the ‘problem’ enters institutional agendas). Second, and most important, our starting point is that numbers and (international) organisations have come to be mutually constitutive. Numbers move: this seemingly simple, yet unique quality has created a fluidity between internal organisational structures and external environments, as well as amongst IOs themselves. Hence, going beyond classic organisational sociology’s distinction between internal structures and external contingencies and environments, this paper purports that numbers –with their qualities to simplify, stabilise and travel- reconfigure relationships, dependencies and structures of organisations and fields in fresh and politically salient ways; in other words, they come to govern them.

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