Scorecards for sustainable local governments

The current paper addresses the issue of performance measurement and benchmarking in local government. It briefly reviews some relevant international experiences and categorizes the existing assessment tools according to their general features. The authors argue that more than the benchmarking results themselves it is the evaluation process that matters. Furthermore, it is suggested that focusing only on effectiveness (e.g. ensuring the availability of certain public services) or efficiency (e.g. achieving good economic performance), is no longer consistent with the challenges that local decision-makers are now facing. Based on this, a conceptual model for benchmarking the “sustainability” of local governments is proposed. The illustrative municipal scorecard is presented for the city of Lisbon. The results show that using a comprehensive approach and a set of simple and carefully selected quantitative and qualitative indicators may empower citizens to act as “armchair auditors” and encourage local governments to realign their objectives.