A Users' Guide to Measuring Local Governance

Introduction
This Guide is intended to respond to an
increasing demand from UNDP Country Offices
and a wide range of national stakeholders for
guidance on the multiplicity of tools and
methods that are being used to measure, assess
and monitor governance at the local level. The
Guide uses the term ‘local governance’ to cover the
range of governance issues that exist at the local
level, including decentralisation of policies and
processes, the roles and inter-relationships of
different actors and institutions, local democracy
and local government performance.
The Guide combines a discussion of theoretical/
conceptual issues relating to local governance
with a review of past and ongoing local
governance assessment initiatives. The proliferation
of different assessments and indicators has
resulted in some confusion about which tools to
use, how they should be applied and their
weaknesses and strengths.
The Guide is essentially made up of two parts;
the first part outlines what is meant by local
governance and describes the kinds of issues,
concepts and priorities for local governance that
existing measurement and assessment tools tend
to focus on. This first part also provides guidance
on challenges and opportunities for assessing
local governance. The guidance is based on direct
feedback from users of assessment tools, a
distillation of good practices, and four illustrative
case study examples.
The second part is the Source Guide, which is an
inventory of existing assessment tools and
methodologies. At present, there is no resource
that offers a global overview bringing together all
existing approaches, tools and methods in this
area. The Source Guide is structured in a way to
provide detailed information on each tool,
including: history, objectives, applicability, the
types and sources of data used, methodology
used, key actors/stakeholders involved, the results
reporting format, the gender and poverty focus (if
it has one), strengths and weaknesses, the
coverage, timeline, the assumptions in the method,
contact details and any supplementary
tools/guidelines related to the particular
instrument. The purpose of compiling and
organising this information is to provide local
governance actors and other stakeholders
engaged in strengthening governance at the local
level with a resource that can be drawn on for
developing new assessment tools or adapting
existing assessment approaches to their specific
contexts. It is important to note that the Guide
does not provide a new measurement or
assessment methodology and it does not propose
any kind of a blueprint.
The Guide is an important component of UNDP’s
body of guidance on measuring and assessing
democratic governance, developed as part of
UNDP’s programme on Governance Assessments. 1
This programme supports nationally owned
processes for assessing and measuring democratic
governance and aims to facilitate the
development of tools which have broad-based
national ownership, are pro-poor and gendersensitive,
and are designed to identify governance
weaknesses and capacity gaps.
1
http://www.undp.org/oslocentre/flagship/democratic_governance_assessments.html
A Users’ Guide to Measuring Local Governance 1