How can governance best be measured? This paper from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) gives an overview of governance indicators and discusses their advantages and disadvantages. It argues that new transforming factors such as the Information Age, globalisation and decentralisation should be taken into account in governance assessments. Citizens’ requirements should be more accurately ascertained and indicators should be more objective and geographically disaggregated in order to implement good governance mechanisms.
Governance refers to the formal and informal arrangements that determine how public decisions are made and how public actions are carried out from the perspective of maintaining a country’s constitutional values. Governance indicators assess and compare the institutional quality of countries and can assist in research and policymaking. They are also being used to evaluate decisions about conditional development assistance.
Governance is ‘good’ when a State efficiently provides public goods of necessary quality to its citizens. Hence states should be assessed on both the quality and the quantity of public goods provided. The policies that supply public goods are guided by principles such as human rights, democratisation, rule of law, equity and strategic vision. In practice, such principles should translate into strengthening democratic institutions.
Whilst measuring governance is vital, there is no definitive authority in public governance evaluation.
- Efforts to measure governance suffer from problems related to the specific interests of the clients or constituents of the organisations that attempt to measure it.
- There is a lack of relevant objective data, which has forced many organisations to rely on subjective data.
- Despite large volumes of data, their usefulness is limited due to quality and incompatibility issues.
- It would be impossible to aggregate all indicators and come up with an index.
The governance evaluation debate is split into local and global. Local assessment is increasing in flexibility and relevance, while global assessment is moving towards standardisation and better trend analysis. Yet it may be possible to design a new data set that is both comprehensive and relevant. Some pointers on the future of governance assessments are as follows:
- It is important to have data on the regional and local levels, as the more resources that are allocated at the subnational level, the more value that citizens obtain.
- It is prudent to pay attention to user satisfaction.
- It is difficult but vital to be able to assess what is effective in the long run, as in the case of education.
- E-governance should be an essential component of the public governance discussion.
- It is important to take advantage of the different but complementary perspectives on public governance evaluation.
- It must be remembered that all data is subject to distortions and caution should be exercised when developing policies.
