New development: The challenges of designing municipal governance indicators

Scorecards for sustainable local governments

“…Technocratic models are developed by experts or consultants on behalf of top management (or central governments, in our case) and involve a normative or prescriptive approach regarding what should be measured and what should be the targets. Contrary to this top-down approach, a participatory process can also be adopted to involve practitioners, users and other stakeholders (Cruz and Marques, 2013). After the design phase, adherence to the performance evaluation programme can still be voluntary or coercive.…”

“…water services, waste management, urban transportation and licensing services) is certainly a more ambitious undertaking. However, though dealing with each competence of local governments might be extremely useful to public servants and even to political leaders (to determine where the room for improvement is exactly), to the general public an excessive number of measures or too much detail may cause "information overload" (Cruz and Marques, 2013). One must ensure that the tool fits the users' needs.…”

“…Discretionary aggregation methods (such as equal weights for all criteria or any other arbitrary elicitation) are theoretically incorrect and in general produce meaningless scores (Cruz and Marques 2013). A suitable weighting procedure takes into account the preferences of the legitimate stakeholders and the interactions between criteria (which should be preferentially independent, Cruz and Marques, 2013). Bearing in mind that aggregation is useful to operationalize and measure complex…”

“…Although the aggregation of the indicators from the four dimensions is possible, it would require the rescaling of the performances attained (to convert impacts in scores) and the definition of performance intervals (two performance references) rather than performance targets (one performance reference). Discretionary aggregation methods (such as equal weights for all criteria or any other arbitrary elicitation) are theoretically incorrect and in general produce meaningless scores (Cruz and Marques 2013). A suitable weighting procedure takes into account the preferences of the legitimate stakeholders and the interactions between criteria (which should be preferentially independent, Cruz and Marques, 2013).…”

Structuring composite local governance indicators

“…Given its theoretical capabilities and professed suitability for designing composite governance indicators (see da Cruz and Marques, 2013), it is curious that none of the assessment frameworks currently used were structured through MCDA modelling. Indeed, with the aid of the MCDA toolkit it is possible to develop a model to assess intangible properties.…”