This article explores why we see educational accountability systems circulating transnationally. It argues that researchers in the field of comparative and international education need to use the concepts of diffusion and translation to think about the formation, coordination and extension of networks and discursive formations through which heterogeneous, disparate objects are brought into relation. Approaching accountability in education as an "apparatus" helps us engage with the research challenges presented by globalisation. This article proposes a way of seeing accountability as constitutive of the global and not as an after-effect. This approach helps us avoid the distracting and ultimately irrelevant fixation on a so-called "global/local nexus" that is characteristic of much work in the field of comparative and international education. It also aims to improve on world culture theory explanations for why we are presently witnessing a global trend towards the increased "monitoring of monitoring", i.e., increased self-organising reflexivity in the self-description and self-observation that school systems are called to engage in.