Le Bay, Sonia et al. (2007) Mali: Assessment of local governance performance: experiences with a self-evaluation tool.

This publication is addressed to all actors working in the field of decentralisation and local governance, especially practitioners and policymakers that deal with capacity building in the area of monitoring, evaluation and democratic control of local governance structures.

The case study presented in this document has been prepared in the context of an exercise that aimed to document, analyse and learn from experiences with different approaches/methods and instruments for building the capacities of different actors in decentralisation and local governance, and in particular, the capacities of local government to monitor and evaluate the outcomes of these complex reform processes.

The authors describe the various stages involved in developing the self-evaluation tool in Mali highlighting the important role that mentoring plays in self-evaluation exercises and the potential pitfalls that the users might encounter. They also examine the problems that the various stakeholders may come up against if they focus solely on performance-based results and disregard the wealth of communication before and after the exercises, which may well pave the way for shared responsibility and consensual decisions.