Measurement & indicators
Monitoring governance: lessons from international experience
Enhancing capacity to monitor government performance
Authors:
M. O’Donnell; Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Unit (ECSPE) Europe and Central Asia Region
Publisher:
World Bank, 2001
This paper develops a set of governance monitoring tools on the basis of international experience.
In contrast to efforts to develop a single governance rating, this approach seeks to collect and propose a range of different instruments and procedures under a single umbrella designed to enhance the capacity to monitor government performance.
The paper begins with a definition and classification of governance monitoring tools. It then distinguishes governance monitoring from more conventional forms of performance monitoring.
The core of the paper is a set of matrices comprising examples of monitoring techniques, collected from a broad range of countries, in the following areas:
- public administration and expenditure management
- public service delivery
- regulation of the business environment
- judicial enforcement of laws
- state capture.
The purpose of the matrices is to provide the reader with a sense of the range of monitoring techniques that have been used across the world, the requirements necessary to implement such techniques and the mechanisms for ensuring that the results of monitoring can influence government actions.
The paper also reviews the risks associated with monitoring governance, both to the monitors themselves and the credibility of monitoring efforts.
Finally, it provides a discussion and review of methodological issues associated with the design of surveys to detect changes over time. In particular, it uses the challenge of monitoring changes in the government’s regulation of the business environment in Russia as an example to explore issues related to sample design and estimation.
