Constructing indicators of progresswellbeing with citizenscommunities

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Constructing indicators of progress/well-being
with citizens/communities

• Dr Jonathan POTTER
• OECD Local Economic and Employment Development
  Programme

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What is an indicator of progress?

• Key considerations
• Defining progress
• Agency deciding who to interact with
• Distinguishing progress monitoring and assessment
  of results of actions to influence progress
• Models of progress
• Objective v. subjective indicators
• Mixing top-down and bottom-up information
• Benchmarking

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Defining progress

• Peoples views vary
• relative importance of trust, safety,
  distribution of income
• right level of trust, safety, income
  distribution
• whether progress means participative democracy,
  high cohesion, collective provision
• or representative democracy, high incentives,
  private provision
• If we are seeking empowerment, should let local
  people decide their own objectives and how to get
  there
• Suggests a decentralised approach handbook on
  how to collect and use but not a prescription of
  indicators to use

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Agency who to interact with

• Most citizens do not have the time or inclination
  to engage more than superficially
• Danger of capture by elites and interest groups
• Process of strategy design and delivery delegated
  to local agencies
• Suggests designing a handbook to be used
  principally by local agencies local
  governments, development agencies, NGOs

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Monitoring v. action assessment

• Two levels of progress indicator
• Monitoring What is the situation, what is
  changing
• Indicates where may need to intervene to improve
• Assessment What are the results of actions taken
  to achieve progress
• Indicates whether actions are working as intended
• Difficult to use monitoring for assessment of
  actions
• Suggests choice to be made on focus of the
  Handbook, monitoring only or monitoring and
  assessment?

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Models of progress

• Need some conceptual framework or theory of
  change
• These models are likely to vary by locality or
  agency
• FIELD approach . . .
• Suggests including indicators on influences of
  policy actions on drivers of progress and on the
  enablers of progress

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OUTPUT TRENDS IN LOCAL DEVELOPMENT PERFORMANCE
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POLICY ACTIONS ON DRIVERS
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Business incubators
Effective labour market functioning
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- Etc
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Support for higher education
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Objective v. subjective indicators

• Simple principle
• Measure what can quantitatively, but without
  distorting the target
• Measure the rest qualitatively, but with maximum
  quality
• Drivers Quantitative traditional statistics
• Enablers Qualitative local surveys, expert
  polls
• Policy results Quantitative and qualitative
  evaluations
• Suggests using many subjective indicators because
  much of what we want to understand requires it

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Top-down bottom-up info

• NSO information not sufficiently spatially
  disaggregated and not covering what local
  agencies believe is important
• Trento example
• Invest in knowledge and education (e.g. learning
  over life course)
• Internationalise research and innovation (e.g.
  professors from outside Italy spend on
  international research projects)
• Maintain cohesive social model (e.g. cooperative
  membership, women with key role in enterprises)
• Suggests combining self-collected and external
  information

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Benchmarking

• Useful to have the same indicators in each
  locality to compare progress/well-being
• But
• Difficulties if we dont compare like with like
• Local people/agencies may have different visions
  of progress and how to achieve it
• Suggests
• core set of indicators
• complementary tailoring to each area
• no composite indicator
• groupings of comparator areas with same
  objectives and legacy