A Users' Guide to Measuring Local Governance

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Governance Index (Indonesia)
Producer
Kemitraan Partnership, an independent Indonesian
research institution
History
The Index has been developed in Indonesia in the
context of the regional autonomy policy and
decentralisation process, which resulted in
significant variations in the “quality” of local
governments. The lack of comprehensive and
rigorous data to investigate such variations in the
quality of governance across provinces led
Kemitraan develop a Governance index that would
be applied in each province, thus allowing not only
for comparisons across provinces, but also for
cross-learning and dissemination of good
practices.
Objectives
The Governance Index has the overall objectives to
• provide a comprehensive and methodologically
sound assessment of governance performance
in all Indonesia provinces;
• rank governance performance in all
Indonesian provinces based on separate
assessments in 4 “areas of governance”:
government, bureaucracy, civil society and
economic society;
• provide an evidence base to the local
governments, the communities and other
relevant stakeholders (including the central
government) to help inform governance
policies and capacity development programmes
at the local level
Applicability
This method is applicable where stakeholders
would like to assess “governance” defined as the
interactions at the local level between the political
office, the bureaucracy, civil society and the
economic society.
Types and sources of data used
Information is mainly quantitative. It is made up of
both subjective and objective data. Subjective
data is obtained through structured interviews of
well-informed persons (guidelines for interview
supplied in the methodology package), which fall
into two groups: those who are the very actors of
the governance processes assessed (representatives
from government, bureaucracy, economic society
and civil society) and those who are not direct
actors but have some interaction with them, or are
concerned with the quality of governance
(academics and journalists).
Objective data consists of statistical data, budgetary
data, local development plan, local legislation
programme, websites, records of coordination
meeting, audits, human development index, etc.
More specifically, for the government area, data is
collected from the provincial secretariat and the
provincial parliament. For the bureaucracy area,
data is collected from the local health, education,
social affairs and revenue collection offices, the
local planning agency, the local anti-corruption
office, the local statistics office, etc.
Methodology
The Index is organised into 4 areas, 8 functions, 6
principles and 75 indicators. Table 10 presents the
distribution of indicators according to the different
areas and functions.
The number of indicators varies from for each
function, as only those good governance
principles which are most relevant to the function
assessed have been translated into indicators. The
following table provides an example of indicators
for each one of the 6 principles, while showing the
area and the function it aims to assess:
A Users’ Guide to Measuring Local Governance 81