Tag: indicators

Policy Practice Brief 6 – What Makes A Good Governance Indicator?

January 2011, Gareth Williams

http://www.thepolicypractice.com/papersdetails.asp?code=17

The rise to prominence of good governance as a key development concern has been marked by an increasing interest in measurement and the production of a huge range of governance indicators. When used carefully such indicators provide a valuable source of information on governance conditions and trends. However, when used carelessly they can misinform and mislead. The purpose of this brief is to make sense of the different types of governance indicator and how they are used and misused. It warns against the commission of ‘seven deadly sins’ representing the most common pitfalls. The paper puts forward guidelines to ensure a more careful use and interpretation of governance indicators, and highlights the need for providers of indicators to be subject to greater transparency, scrutiny, evaluation and peer review. From the perspective of political economy analysis the challenge is to make the indicators more relevant to understanding the underlying political processes that are the key drivers of better governance.

Monitoring and Evaluating Civil Service Performance

[from the Research Helpdesk of the Governance and Social Development Resource Centre ]

Request: Summarise recent research findings and intellectual debate on how to best monitor and evaluate civil service performance, including international best practice and issues around standardised indicators (along the lines of the PEFA framework).

Key findings: There continues to be debate as to how best to monitor and evaluate civil service performance. This debate relates to what to measure, the best indicators to use, whether such a framework is appropriate and how best to implement a chosen framework.<>

When creating evaluation procedures for civil service performance it is important to clarify the level of evaluation. Is it at an individual level, a team level, an institutional level, or at system level? There is currently no performance appraisal system which has been widely considered objective and effective for assessing performance at an individual level.

UNDP (2009) currently provides the most comprehensive guide to measuring public administration performance. The first part of the guide consists of guidance based on feedback from users of assessments tools and a distillation of good practices. The second part provides detailed information on public administration assessment tools, with nine assessment tools provided for assessing Public Human Resource Management. Many of these tools derive their indicators from private sector practice. The World Bank’s Actionable Governance Indicators Instrument is arguably the most comprehensive in terms of breadth of indicators.

Full response: http://www.gsdrc.org/docs/open/HD722.pdf

Conference: Making the Invisible Visible: An Emerging Community of Practice in Indicators, Sustainability and Values

Date: December 16-18, 2010
Venue: University of Brighton, UK

The University of Brighton will be hosting a groundbreaking, EU funded, international conference on the theme of Making the Invisible Visible: An Emerging Community of Practice in Indicators, Sustainability and Values, bringing together the leading thinkers, practitioners and organizations in these fields.  The conference will also showcase a pioneering €1million EU funded project to trial values-based indicators at the project (see www.wevalue.org), which has demonstrated its value as a tool to measure in a non-reductionist, yet rigorous way, the values dimension of civil society activity, and offers a model of good practice in  civil society-university collaborations.

Among the speakers due to address the conference are global experts in economics, such as Augusto Lopez-Claros (former Chief Economist and Director of the the Global Competitveness Report at the World Economic Forum, and developer of the Humanitarian Response Index); leading environmentalists such as Arthur Dahl (President of the International Environment Forum, former Deputy Assistant Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and former coordinator of the UN System-Wide Earthwatch) and Professor Arjen Wals (UNESCO Chair of Social Learning and Sustainable Development and world expert on environmental education); parliamentarians  such as Professor Bedrich Moldan (Senator in the Parliament of the Czech Republic and a global authority on indicators for sustainable development); civil society organizations as diverse as the International Red Cross, Earth Charter International, the Alliance for Religions and Conservation (ARC, among others; world experts on values in business across the world, such as Richard Barrett (leadership expert mapping values among some 2000 organizations and 3000 leaders in over 40 countries); and many more.

Attendance is free, and there are still possibilities to contribute with a presentation and/or a workshop on the connection between values, sustainability and the challenges of evaluation in your work.

To register at the conference please go to: http://www.brighton.ac.uk/sdecu/research/esdinds/conference/index.html

Critique of Governance Assessment Applications

GRDC Helpdesk Research Report by Sumedh Rao, Governance and Social Development Resource Centre, July 2010. 16 pages. Available as pdf

Query:  Identify the key literature that critiques the use and application of governance assessments.  Enquirer: DFID

Contents
1. Overview
2. General critiques
3. Critiques of measurement
4. Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI)
5. African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM)
6. Other assessments
7. Donor Guidance
8. Initiatives for improving assessments

Including a bibliography of 39 annotated references Continue reading “Critique of Governance Assessment Applications”

What should be found within an M&E framework / plan?

I was asked this question by a client some time ago. After some thinking about something that I felt I should have already known, I drafted up a one page guidance note for my client. The contents of the note also benefited from a discussion about appropriate expectations about M&E frameworks with other M&E people on the MandE NEWS email list

I have attached the one page guidance note here: What should be found in an M&E Framework / Plan?

Please feel free to post your comments on this document below. And to suggest any other documents or websites where this topic is covered.

PS: 28 October 2011: This one-pager contains a summary of the proposed contents of an M&E Framework for a DFID project, prepared this year

PS: 12 February 2014: Benedictus Dwiagus Stepantoro has sent me this link to the DFAT (was AusAID) Monitoring and Evaluation standards that were updated in 2013. He points especially  to standard no.2 on Initiative M&E System there, and comments:

” I use it all the time as reference in checking the quality of M&E system in program/project/initiative, as I often receive 3-5 M&E System/Plan documents every year to be assessed.

 The main key feature for an M&E system there are:

 – Should have an ‘evaluability assessment’, as basis for developing the M&E system.

– Have clarity on program outcome, key output, approach/modality and the logic around them

– Have Evaluation Questions, or Performance Key Questions/Indicators

– Methodology/Tools – including baseline

– Should have sufficient resource (people with right expertise, fund for M&E activities.etc)

– Scheduling of M&E activities

– Costing/Budget allocation for M&E

– Clear responsibility

….People often shows me a logframe or a matrix of indicator and proudly state that their program have an “M&E System”,… But,…. For me, .. A logframe alone, is not an M&E System. A matrix of Indicators alone, is not an M&E system”

Training: Monitoring and Evaluation for Results

Date: July 6-17, 2009
Venue: The World Bank Headquarters
1818 H Street, NW Washington, DC 20433

SPONSORS
World Bank Institute Evaluation Group (WBIEG)

TOPICS
Introduction to Monitoring and Evaluation
Logic Models and Evaluation Questions
Indicators and Measurement
Research Designs
Data Collection
Reconstructing Baseline Data
Sampling
Data Analysis
The Practice of Impact Evaluation
Reporting Results and Utilization of Evaluations
Managing Monitoring and Evaluation Functions
Continue reading “Training: Monitoring and Evaluation for Results”

Training: Monitoring and Evaluation for Results

Date: May 11-15, 2009
Venue: Hotel Africa in Tunis, Tunisia

SPONSORS
World Bank Institute Evaluation Group (WBIEG) and Joint Africa Institute (JAI)

TOPICS
Introduction to Monitoring and Evaluation
Logic Models and Evaluation Questions
Indicators and Measurement
Research Designs
Data Collection
Reconstructing Baseline Data
Sampling
Data Analysis
The Practice of Impact Evaluation
Reporting Results and Utilization of Evaluations
Managing Monitoring and Evaluation Functions
Continue reading “Training: Monitoring and Evaluation for Results”

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