Abstract
There has been enormous activity in many countries and by international agencies during the last few decades to develop indicators to measure trends in different attributes of the environment, including indicators for community wellbeing and for sustainable development. Identifying appropriate indicators of economic, social, environmental, cultural and democratic progress across local government boundaries, as a basis for a strategy to enhance community governance, and as part of a national system of sustainability indicators, is a challenging task. An important dimension that is implicit rather than explicit in the current literature is the significance of institutional barriers to developing indicators. Informed by recent New Zealand experiences, our objective in this paper is to examine those institutional barriers within the context of achieving the wider objectives of the New Zealand Local Government Act 2002 to strengthen participatory democracy and community governance, and the ‘whole-of-government’ sustainable development paradigm that underpins it. We argue that the significance of undertaking the task of indicator development in a collaborative and participatory as well as technically satisfactory manner should not be under-estimated.
Highlights
Many governments are striving to improve the way they measure progress and plan for change from an integrated participatory, ‘whole-ofgovernment’, and sustainable development perspective
There has been considerable interest within the central government sector during the last few years in developing sectoral indicators; the national association of New Zealand local authorities Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ) and Statistics New Zealand have been keen to link these initiatives with meeting the needs of local authorities, there has been an absence of co-ordinated and timely guidance from central government to assist development of local government capability
A more coorientated and integrated approach to monitoring is needed under the collaborative leadership of Statistics New Zealand and the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA)
Summary
Many governments are striving to improve the way they measure progress and plan for change from an integrated participatory, ‘whole-ofgovernment’, and sustainable development perspective. Indicator development is not just a technical exercise and it is imperative that indicators should reflect the values of the diverse communities they serve. This is best achieved through a participatory indicator development process. An important dimension that is implicit rather than explicit in the current literature is the significance of institutional barriers to developing community indicators.. Informed by recent New Zealand experience, our objective in this paper is to examine those institutional barriers within the context of achieving the wider objectives of the New Zealand Local Government Act 2002 ( the LGA or the Act) to strengthen participatory democracy and community governance, and the whole-ofgovernment sustainable development paradigm that underpins it. We argue that the significance of undertaking the task of indicator development in a collaborative and participatory as well as technically satisfactory manner should not be under-estimated
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