A Users' Guide to Measuring Local Governance

Box 5.
Key phases in a governance assessment
Preparatory phase: Identifying and recruiting the team that will carry out the assessment and develop a detailed work
programme. The team should be as broad-based as possible in terms of gender, ethnicity, age and social background.
It is particularly important to have a strong presence of community workers.The detailed work plan should include the
‘communication of results’ phase.
Partnership promoting phase: Promoting and facilitating coordination of different local stakeholders involved in the
process.The team should seek the broadest possible local ‘sponsorship’ of the assessment. Important stakeholders not
attending an initial planning meeting should be followed up. During this phase every effort should be made to
widely publicise the forthcoming assessment in order to avoid any future misunderstanding with regard to its purpose.
A supervisory committee should be established with respresentation from a wide range of stakeholders. In order to
ensure sustainability, a central task of this committee should be to monitor the implementation of the action plan
arising from the assessment results.
Development phase: Designing the assessment scope and focus areas (including selection of indicators) and
developing the tools to be used to collect the governance information. When carried out in a highly participatory
manner, the detailed discussion over the selection of indicators to be used provides an excellent opportunity to
actively involve a broad range of stakeholders in the assessment as well as to create the ‘team spirit’ needed to break
down any mutual suspicions of different stakeholders and so help to carry forward the initiative.
Fieldwork phase: Data collection. It is essential the data collection team is fully briefed about and committed to the
underlying normative assumptions of the local governance assessment.They should also be preferentially selected on
the basis of their knowledge of the local area and ability to speak languages of different communities.
Analytical phase: Analysing the data. Data analysis is the process of summarizing data and interpreting the findings in
a way that develops conclusions The analytical phase also includes discussions of the findings/conclusions.
Action planning and dissemination phase: Developing an action plan through consultations with different stakeholders
and disseminate the results of the analytical work and launch the action plan. Right from the start of the initiative, the
initiators of the assessment need to develop a clear strategy for communicating the results, rather than leaving the
design of such a strategy until after the results are available. This strategy should be innovative, identifying and
prioritising the ‘multiple points of entry’ by which the results can impact on opinion shapers and policy-makers – the
plurality of local political organisations, social groups and civil society organizations etc.
Policy implementation phase: Implementing the action plan and monitoring progress. Monitoring of the action plan is
a crucial element to ensure the sustainability of the governance assessment. For this reason, it is suggested that this
should be a major responsibility of the supervisory committee established during the partnership promoting phase.
These key phases have been adapted from ‘Governance Diagnostic Capacity Building:
The Methodological Approach’, World Bank Institute.
Traditional leaders/institutions: by virtue of their
powerful influence over local people they have a
responsibility and a capacity to stimulate popular
participation in the assessment process.Traditional
leaders are important to engage in the
development, fieldwork and dissemination phases
of the assessment.
Local businesses: the private sector has an
economic role to play by providing goods and
services to the market and creating employment.
Its role is circumscribed by the environment
created by local and central government.
Ordinary citizens: in most cases, organisations and
representatives of elected bodies will be acting on
citizens’ behalf but this does not mitigate the
responsibility of ensuring that citizens have access
to information concerning the assessment process
and the assessment results. Building relationships
12 UNDP Oslo Governance Centre