From Global to Local: Regional- and City-Level Alternatives to Global Rankings

Abstract

This chapter discusses the recent tendency to localize the rankings and indicators on competitiveness, innovation, and higher education. The localization of ranking comes in the form of regional and city rankings, challenging the dominant imaginary assuming global comparability of similar units or the state-centric understanding of world order. Nevertheless, conceptually or methodologically regional and local alternatives hardly depart from the global indicators. Local variants often rely on familiar data sources and established data producers. They reproduce the old imagery of competition, but now on the city level of actorhood. In fact, due to the lack of urban data, many city rankings on innovation make use of national data employed by the established global indicators.