What is it about?
Most of the benchmarking criteria, models and methods which are currently available and which are being used to assess local service delivery no longer suit the needs of localities. Good local management implies not just high performance in managing local services, so that they satisfy customers and taxpayers, but also high performance in enabling local communities to solve their own problems and to create better futures for their stakeholders. This article suggests that local government reforms need to go beyond the improvement of local service delivery. Calling upon international experience of innovation in local governance, the article distils a series of benchmarking criteria which might be applied to define and identify ‘good local governance’.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Local authorities are the most obvious stakeholders to undertake a new generation of governance benchmarking. They have always been much closer to citizens than regional, national or international levels of government. The political and economic environment and the functions of local authorities impose upon them pressures to demonstrate their contribution to local communities. These pressures will often be perceived as threatening, since many stakeholders will be hostile in their attitudes to what they will often regard as the inadequate contributions being made by local government (and, indeed, higher levels of government) to improved quality of life in the local area. However, as this article shows, these same pressures simultaneously provide local authorities, and other local stakeholders, with exciting opportunities to develop new and more successful practices of good local governance.
Perspectives
Various pressures towards greater transparency in all sectors are likely to drive the use of a new generation of performance information by different local actors. With the widespread crisis of legitimacy of the state in most OECD countries, and with increasing public suspicion of the competence and motives of public service organizations, stakeholders are coming to the view that they need to scrutinize areas of decision-making which in the past they would accept on trust. Some of this pressure from the public can be met by enacting freedom of information laws, as many states have done. However, this will generally not be enough to convince the wider public that governments are doing a good job. A much deeper and more convincing set of information must not only be available to the public but must be effectively marketed to them. Of course, there will also be vested interests lobbying against more transparency but it will become harder for any kind of organization to hold back information requested by external stakeholders. Even more important, it will be essential to grow the public which wants and understands this information.
Professor Tony Bovaird
University of Birmingham
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Moving from Excellence Models of Local Service Delivery to Benchmarking ‘Good Local Governance’, International Review of Administrative Sciences, March 2002, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0020852302681001.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
