Loquai, C and S. Le Bay (2007) Building capacities for monitoring and evaluating decentralisation and local governance: Experiences, challenges, perspectives

This brief from the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM) suggests that greater efforts be made to build local capacities for monitoring and evaluating decentralisation and local governance. It argues that involving local actors in monitoring and evaluation will both facilitate the decentralisation process and improve the performance and legitimacy of local governments.

In the late 1980s, many African countries launched a new generation of decentralisation policies aimed to build or strengthen more democratic, participatory and accountable forms of governance.

 Yet for many of these countries, the road of reform has been bumpy. The complexity and multidimensional character of decentralisation processes was met with inconsistent commitment and political will and, consequently, yielded mixed results. Progress has been seen in some countries, however, and it is hoped that further democratic decentralisation will produce elected local governments that will be more accountable to citizens and more easily controlled than central state administrators.

As local governments are learning to formulate and implement municipal or regional development plans, they often lack necessary baseline data and statistical information to effectively analyse the social, economic and cultural situation in the territory. Case studies from West Africa demonstrate that it is worthwhile to invest in the capacities of different local actors to monitor and evaluate the outcomes of democratic decentralisation processes, local governance and municipal development.

• Approaches involving a broad spectrum of local actors in designing and testing innovative monitoring and evaluation (M&E) tools can have a number of positive effects, including:
• strengthening local M&E capacity;
• building trust among local stakeholders with different interests, thus reducing resistance to devolution;
• making local governance and service provision more efficient by improving procedures and mobilising citizen initiative and local resources;
• improving information flows between different actors and levels of local government; and
  sensitising citizens to their rights and their duty to hold local representatives accountable.

Involving local actors in the M&E process will undoubtedly face many challenges. Participants may be unaccustomed to working together and may lack clarity as to their respective rights and responsibilities in such a process. Moreover, historical and cultural traditions and experiences may impede efforts to monitor and evaluate government performance. Likewise, donors may pursue strategies that prioritise the short-term information gains over the long-term sustainability of more participatory governance.

 Nevertheless, the potential benefits of building capacity for monitoring and evaluating decentralisation and local governance is clear. West African case study experiences, however, offer some instructive recommendations for maximising the impact of these interventions:

• Donors and their partners can learn from existing tools for building M&E capacity at the local level and should make greater efforts to document and disseminate these tools.
• Donors and national authorities committed to democratic decentralisation should invest more in the capacities of stakeholders of the new local government systems.
• Efforts to develop M&E capacity in a participatory way with local-level stakeholders of decentralisation processes should also involve national authorities in such initiatives to spur quicker institutionalisation.

Alliances and coordination of M&E approaches is important to prevent a proliferation of different tools and a confusion of objectives.

Original source of abstract: http://www.gsdrc.org/go/display&type=Document&id=3289