A Users' Guide to Measuring Local Governance

imparting information, these meetings also serve
as an important mechanism to solicit the views of
the public on issues of importance to local
government. Such meetings may help both to
disseminate governance assessment results and to
provide a mechanism for citizens to draw attention
to deficiencies and to propose measures to raise
governance performance.
Oversight committees and citizen advisory boards:
Oversight committees are external committees
that oversee the operations and activities of
specific local government committees such as
finance, public works, health and education. These
committees perform an important role in
gathering information on the functioning of
individual departments and ensuring, through
their oversight and questioning of management
officials, that corrupt practices do not take place.
Citizen advisory boards are also structured around
specific issues but have a looser advisory role than
the more formalised role of the oversight
committee, with members who are less likely to be
employees of the authority. Members of these
committees and boards combine relevant
expertise of the subject with active participation in
the local community. For these reasons, they are
ideally suited to dissemination and response to
governance assessment results.
Local Anti-Corruption Agencies: In response to the
growth of local government responsibilities
associated with decentralization programmes,
anti-corruption agencies have often been created
at the local level. These can serve as watchdog for
local government entities; to provide an effective
vehicle to disseminate information regarding
the ethics rules and regulations pertaining to
government employment; to study and draft good
governance policies and to ensure that those in
government who breach the public trust are held
accountable for their actions. A proactive
community/grassroots outreach programme is a
key element of such local anti-corruption agencies.
The dissemination by such agencies of the results
of governance assessments can play a major part
in raising citizen awareness of major deficiencies in
local governance.
Participatory Budgeting: Participatory Budgeting is
a significant innovative practice that can help to
enhance participation and improve downward
accountability in the administration of financial
matters. In particular, by raising citizen participation
beyond the electoral process through the
mechanism of thematic and neighbourhood
meetings, participatory budgeting can help to
enhance local democratic culture, nurture civic
engagement, and stimulate the development of
social capital. Although concerned primarily with
ensuring that there is a better fit between the
allocation of local financial resources and citizens
expressed needs, the participatory mechanisms
employed can also help to address deficiencies as
expressed by the results of local governance
performance assessment.
This chapter highlights the most pressing issues
that users of assessments of local governance have
identified. Its content is based on telephone
interviews with more than twenty representatives
from the practitioner community, including
intergovernmental, donor, government, research
and civil society communities (see interviewees’
list in acknowledgements section). The semistructured
interviews covered the assessments
and indicators that they made use of, the role of
these in development policy and planning
processes, and their major strengths and
weaknesses. Six major issues were highlighted by
the interviewees and are presented here, in each
case with an associated checklist of ‘good practice’
guidelines.
22
From Framework for Promoting Transparency at the Local Level, UN-HABITAT
http://ww2.unhabitat.org/cdrom/TRANSPARENCY/html/transpl.html
A Users’ Guide to Measuring Local Governance 23