How to assess democratic governance

This section addresses the need to better understand various methods and approaches to assess and measure democratic governance and its links to pro-poor planning, budgeting, and delivery of the MDGs. It aims to help in analysing the viability of various approaches in terms of the implications for participation, consultation, accountability, transparency, representation, deliberation, and decision-making for democratising the institutions, rules, and overall governance.

Citizen-driven government performance

J. Banning / Panos Pictures

This paper addresses such issues as how can we foster citizen participation in managerial decision making in government? Will citizen participation improve managerial decisions in the public sector? Can we develop performance indicators to ensure that managerial decisions in government reflect the interests of the citizenry?

Latest Additions

How can we measure public administration performance? A guide: ( M. Laberge (ed);J. Nahem (ed);K. Brown / United Nations Development Programme , 2009); The proliferation of different public administration (PA) assessment tools has resulted in some confusion about which tools to use, how they should be applied and their weaknesses and strengths. This ...
National Human Development Reports and their use of democratic governance indicators: ( J. Nahem (ed) / United Nations Development Programme , 2004); 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 acad...
How to select pro-poor and gender sensitive governance indicators: a guide: ( United Nations Development Programme , 2006); There are many indicators of democratic governance used in poor countries but most of them have been externally developed by private sector risk assessment agencies and international organizations. Th...
A comparative anaysis of fragility indices: ( J. F. Mata;S. Ziaja / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik / German Development Institute (GDI) , 2011); Although the understanding of the security threats posed by fragile states is still highly hypothetical and merits further investigation, fragile states are often considered an ideal breeding ground f...
Considering country corruption self-assessment: ( S. Repucci (ed) / Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway , 2009); The UN Convention against Corruption offers countries a unique framework to strengthen their ability to prevent and combat corruption. The self-assessment checklist is one of the few available methods...

UNDP Governance Assessment Portal

GAP network on governance assessments

These how-to pages bring together various methods and experiences in a step by step guide to governance assessments at the country level. It constitutes a live document and a continously growing repository of knowledge on practices of governance assessments. More...