A Users' Guide to Measuring Local Governance

y the State and the municipality as an impartial
and competent reviewer. Once the evaluation
is completed, municipalities that present red
indicators choose at least three areas where the
three levels of government will coordinate actions
and programmes to bring improvements and
achieve green scores, and obtain a certificate of
quality.
Key actors/stakeholders
The municipality represents the main actor of the
assessment process as it is a self-evaluation
instrument: at least four officials belonging to
different ‘sections’ of municipal government and
administration should apply the diagnostic tool.
For the category of Institutional Development for a
Good Government, one key official is the City
Council Treasury Secretary. Ideally, members of the
administration, town hall and wider population
should also participate in the assessment.
The town hall approves the results in order to
formalise the process of evaluation and certification
of municipal improvements.
A third neutral body, such as an NGO, is also
involved in the assessment process, notably in
verifying the results of the self-evaluation.
The national and state governments promote
the application of the Agenda and provide
the necessary coordination, information and
administrative support to municipalities
implementing the tool. National and state
governments also help identify programmes and
actions that can help municipalities to move from
red to green practices.
Results reporting format
At the end of the assessment process, the
municipality has to fill a “summary sheet” for each
category according to the format shown in figure 3:
Gender focus
There is a gender-focused indicator (indicator 3.4.)
assessing whether the municipality promotes
gender equity in the category “Socially Inclusive
Development”. This indicator introduces 22
different parameters to assess municipal capacity
to promote gender equity, including the existence
of municipal programmes in relation to day
nursery, institutional and entrepreneurial
awareness in gender recruiting, individual and
collective credit schemes for women, to recruitment
of women in public administrations, etc.
Poverty focus
There is a poverty-focused indicator (indicator
3.11) assessing whether the municipality runs
specific programmes to fight poverty, in the
category “Socially Inclusive Development”. This
indicator introduces 22 different parameters
to assess municipal capacity to fight poverty,
including the existence of municipal programmes
of training and education for low-income adult
population, of job creation, credit and food
security for the poorest, as well as the existence of
coordination mechanisms amongst different levels
governments and with civil society to fight poverty.
Strengths
• The self-evaluation tool can be used by
Mexican municipalities as guidelines on how
to carry out decentralization, and how to foster
coordination amongst the different levels of
government.
• The results can be easily communicated to the
population given the simple presentation of
results using the three-color code, which
fosters downwards accountability.
• The three-color code for presenting results
focuses attention on weaker areas within a
municipality, and downplays inter-municipality
comparisons, which makes the assessment less
politically threatening to individual municipal
governments. In other words, the tool is not
meant to evaluate or rank municipalities, but to
help them identify areas for improvements and
take concrete action to improve performance
in these areas.
• Involvement of a third independent party to
cross-check results.
Weaknesses
• The tool relies exclusively on objective data
assessing the existence of mechanisms and
processes for local governance, but fails to
assess the quality of these mechanisms.
• Gender and poverty disaggregation could
have been mainstreamed across all indicators,
instead of having specific indicators measuring
gender equality and the “fight against poverty”.
A Users’ Guide to Measuring Local Governance 97