A Users' Guide to Measuring Local Governance

Box 12.
Communicating research
Research on its own cannot bring about change. Research must be communicated in an appropriate form if new
knowledge is to bring about improvements in the lives of the world’s poorest people.The research must also be useful
and accessible to people, who may require additional skills and capacity to enable this. Experience tells us that
nless communication of research is planned for throughout a research programme, including once it’s completed, then
research uptake and impact may be limited 21 . A top-down, linear approach to communication, where a homogenous
group of end users receive information, is unlikely to lead to change. Communication of research should be an
iterative, interactive and multi-directional process that involves a wide range of stakeholders from planning, through to
design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation. The shortcomings of the linear model are widely recognised,
and the question that is asked instead concerns research uptake pathways:‘Why are some of the ideas that circulate in
the research/policy networks picked up and acted on, while others are ignored and disappear?’ Or, to phrase it from the
perspective of those engaged in research:‘How can we market our ideas so that they are noticed? What do we have to
do to influence policy in a pro-poor and evidence-based direction?
Box 13.
Translating assessment results into recommendations
Here are six pointers for translating assessment results into recommendations for improvements in local governance:
1 Identify the most urgent priorities for making improvements in local governance and craft recommendations that
can help address these most urgent issues from an immediate, medium-term and long-term perspective.
2 Isolate those aspects of local governance which municipal authorities and administrators can address on their own
and those that require the involvement of other stakeholders (such as national or regional officials).
3 Build on the strengths that are identified in the assessment and do not focus only on the shortcomings that the
evaluation has brought to the surface or highlighted.
4 Separate out problems that require major institutional change, those that involve personalities or individuals, and
those than can be addressed through policy change.
5 Develop an approach to making recommendations that links systemic problems with an integrated effort to
ameliorate them over time. That is, rather than developing a simple list of things that could be done to improve
local level governance, participants are asked to think through a strategy that first addresses why the problems
have occurred and then comes up with a series of steps involving political leaders, civic actors and citizens.
6. Sketch out a way in which these steps can unfold over a defined period of time (with the most critical concerns
addressed immediately while at the same time developing a longer-term approach) and identify methods for
monitoring progress on improving democracy.
Source: Adapted from IDEA (2002) Local Democracy Assessment Guide
http://www.idea.int/democracy/upload/Local_Dem_Assessment_Guide.pdf
21
From United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) Research on Communication and Getting Research into
Use http://www.dfid.gov.uk/consultations/crd/section5.pdf
A Users’ Guide to Measuring Local Governance 21