Benchmarking as a tool for policy improvement

The report includes:

• Practical guidelines and considerations for the design of policy benchmarking 
• Practical considerations of how policy benchmarking can become part of the tools used in the gender mainstreaming policy mission.

What is policy benchmarking?

Benchmarking has its origins in the corporate world used to compare company performance. It can also be used as a tool for policy assessment. Gender equality and policy are also themselves very complex issues and spaces. Identifying criteria and designing methods for benchmarking in this context can be challenging.

Lessons to better harness benchmarking as a policy improvement tool?  

A FLIARA report sought to identify what we can learn from the current ways policy benchmarking is approached to move towards a better use of benchmarking as a policy improvement tool.  

Some of the key takeaways include: 

• Given that benchmarking is essentially a comparative exercise, benchmarking different national policy from across the EU against each other presents challenges when there are different governance structures and overarching policy frameworks.
• The wider context of rural and gender equality also presents issues such as considering the diversity of rural regions as well as how women can face different needs, opportunities and challenges in different contexts. This means that depending on the context, different benchmarks may have varying levels of importance. 

Depending on the benchmarking approach used, this can be: 

• A significant activity over a period of time
• A one-time high level assessment exercise. 
• The full potential of benchmarking appears to emerge when it is not a one-time, high level comparative exercise.
• A more promising approach should think about adapting benchmarks as time passes and extending the role of benchmarking to include identifying and assessing more deeply the good practices identified by benchmarking.