What is it about?
This article reports the results of an intensive study of the quality of local governance in a town in the UK, demonstrating how the concept of local governance can be operationalized, presenting key findings on the quality of local governance in the case study and suggesting that more limited, service-oriented, performance assessment systems may be misleading.
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Why is it important?
Performance measurement in the public sector has so far focused on service quality and efficiency. For citizens, however, the more important issues are how well local agencies contribute to improving quality of life and how well they conform to ‘good governance’ principles such as transparency, consultation and fairness. For partners, the willingness of others to work in partnership is critical. The governance test undertaken in Carrick allowed assessment of both these aspects of the quality of local governance. The approach generated practical ideas for intervention and demonstrated the level of local support for such initiatives, with evidence on which stakeholders were prepared to put in their own resources (for example volunteering time) to implement them. The results of this study suggest that assessment of the quality of local governance is an area which deserves to be explored in more depth, as it may throw a very different light on the performance of local agencies. In the meantime, the results of more limited, service- oriented, performance assessment systems need to be interpreted with care, given that they largely miss out on these governance dimensions and ignore the strong and complex interactions between the various dimensions of both quality of life and governance principles/ processes. Finally, the results reported here on how the local quality of life has increased and the level ofadherence to locally agreed governance principles and processes do not yet allow a judgement to be made on whether increased adherence to agreed governance principles and processes will necessarily improve either services or quality of life. To demonstrate these relationships would require the calibration of governance scorecards, such as in this article, over time and in a number ofdifferent contexts. However, the methodology outlined here should make a contribution to compiling an appropriate evidence base for this question to be explored in future.
Perspectives
The experience of the governance test, which is outlined in this article, suggests that performance reporting in the public domain needs to be more appropriate for multi-stakeholder environments. In particular, it should report separately the views of all key stakeholders. This is not only more honest in terms of informing the governance debate but it also would have the added advantage of highlighting the differential outcomes in quality of life, service quality and governance processes across geographical communities and across stakeholder groups. While some international agencies are increasingly trying to find ways of assessing the quality ofgovernance (for example World Bank, 2006), there is still very limited success in ensuring that all relevant stakeholders have their views systematically recorded and clearly reported during the policy making process. The methodology reported here responds directly to this need.
Professor Tony Bovaird
University of Birmingham
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Assessing the Quality of Local Governance: A Case Study of Public Services, Public Money & Management, September 2007, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9302.2007.00597.x.
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