What can 'benchmarking' offer the open method of co-ordination?

Benchmarking offers actors a means of resolving the horizontal and vertical collective action problems that often bedevil the development and implementation of decision-making. It has assumed a vital role in the EU's 'open method of co-ordination' with its focus on the identification and dissemination of 'best practice' through mutual learning and peer review, offering new solutions for policy management in an increasingly complex, diverse and uncertain environment. Yet the evolution of benchmarking from management tool to regulatory instrument is also problematic, and not just because it remains conceptually ambiguous and technically difficult to effect in practice. More fundamentally, the mechanisms of control that underpin benchmarking in large companies are generally unavailable to public policy-makers. As a result, benchmarking must be looser at EU level, and perhaps ultimately viewed as a complementary rather than an alternative form of regulation.