Social benchmarks have become a popular instrument amongst public policymakers. The first part of the article reviews the application of benchmarks as an evaluation tool and their significance in the evaluation of activating social security policies under New Public Management. It offers a typology in terms of aims and types of benchmarks and several examples of applications of different types of benchmarks using examples from Dutch activating social security policies. The second part of the article analyses bench-learning by showing how to get the most out of benchmarks.
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