UNDP National Human Development Reports (NHDR) and the use of democratic governance indicators

There exists a multiplicity of governance indicators that are almost exclusively used as country-ranking instruments intended for business investment, donor allocation, civil society advocacy and academic purposes. The majority are of a very limited use to stakeholders in countries because they do not provide policy-makers with disaggregate information at the national or sub-national level on governance issues.

The most commonly used governance indicators are from Freedom House, Transparency International and the World Bank Institute. They do not provide any information on how poverty groups in developing countries are faring. As at September 2004 there were 350 National Human Development Reports (NHDRs) published in 135 countries. They mostly use perception based surveys, national administrative data and human development indicators as proxies to measure democratic governance.

The purpose of this study is to review NHDRs that have a significant focus on the use of democratic governance indicators. It uses case studies from Argentina, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Kosovo and Thailand. Each of the case studies is analyzed using the following criteria:

• Multidimensionality - the multidimensional character of human development and governance
• Policy relevance - the policy implications in support of informed decision-making on strategies and programs
• Spatial disaggregation - mapping of uneven progress across a country’s regions
• Temporal comparison - assessing whether governance at national and sub-national levels improves or regresses over time
• Transparency and replicability - testing whether the methodology for developing indicators is simple and replicable

The study concludes that:

• The NHDRs it has reviewed tend to use governance indicators to address policy issues and help point out priority attention areas
• The indicators suggest policy implications and can often serve to support informed decision-making on strategies and programmes aimed at addressing inequalities
• The case-studies have a high level of governance indicators disaggregation across administrative units, demography and ethnicity although most of the governance measures do not provide temporal disaggregation
• The surveys and administrative data can potentially serve as baselines for future measurements
• The case studies demonstrate innovative use of governance indicators which are replicable in other country settings
• The NHDR framework has tremendous potential to produce governance indicators that are: poverty and gender focused, policy-action oriented, nationally owned and participatory, and methodologically sound
• NHDRs need to consistently collect governance data over time to enable policy-makers to monitor progress/regress to identify priority-attention areas.