Audit tools have significantly grown in popularity over the past decade as part of a global drive to measure the performance of various institutions against a set of indicators and to score performance in a range of indices. In this report for the Global Centre for Pluralism (GCP), my colleague Argyro Kartsonaki and I examine a wide range of existing such tools and argue that the GCP should consider the development of an audit tool in the context of establishing pluralism benchmarks and a pluralism monitor: well-defined benchmarks will be critical to give practical meaning to an audit tool; an audit tool, while in some sense an independent instrument to be used by others to assess the state of pluralism, for example, in their country, region, or city, can simultaneously provide the methodology underpinning the construction of a national, regional, or global pluralism index; and a pluralism index thus constructed can serve as one form of validation for the utility of an audit tool and the relevance of its benchmarks.
This paper can be found as an open-access publication here and here.