Inspection has been identified as a form of ‘governing at a distance’ associated with the rise of the audit culture, audit society, performance management, the evaluative state or the competitive-evaluative nexus (see Strathern, 2000; Power, 1997). It takes its place alongside a battery of technologies and practices that address the problem of governing organisations indirectly. At the core of the renewed role for inspection is the problem of control in the disaggregated/disintegrated/dispersed state (Clarke and Newman, 1997). ‘Performance’ is one way of naming the problems of control at a distance and the proposed solutions to them . Our investigation reveals that there is not one practice that is common to all three national settings and it may be productive to think of these different institutionalizations of inspection as particular governmental assemblages: institutionalized in temporary, yet apparently solid, formations (Newman and Clarke, 2009). This paper makes visible several different forms of ‘distance’: most obviously, the governmental distance associated with a disaggregated or dispersed state (Slaughter, 2004; Clarke and Newman, 1997) and its different constitution inthe three national cases.