MOVEMENT TOWARDS LOCAL INDICATORS PROJECTS
responsibility increasingly falls to local government
- A primary outcome of changes in national social and urban policy in the 1980s and 90s was increased devolution of responsibility to State and particularly local officials. There continues to be considerable bipartisan support for the idea that local stakeholders are in a better position than Federal or State officials to plan and implement most local development and social service initiatives that address the particular problems in their own cities or regions.
new players emerge
- Partly as a byproduct of reduced Federal involvement, a host of non-governmental institutions and partnerships emerged to spearhead local urban social and development initiatives. These groups collaborate more and more with local governments to develop comprehensive strategies for urban improvement that cut across traditionally separate functional specialties (e.g. various social services, crime prevention, education, job creation, housing, environmental protection).
the need for better information
- As local entities became responsible for designing and carrying out these strategies, local leaders recognized the urgent need for an improved information base.
community indicators projects
- Community indicators projects have emerged throughout the nation in recent decades as a way to gather and communicate information measuring the performance of a community in relation to its self-defined values.
- These projects try to quantify the typically qualitative phenomenon of community well-being using more measures than just economic indicators. The projects create and examine indicators for a combination of economic, environmental, public health and other social attributes.
- The objective is to track community conditions, bring together diverse constituent groups, and ultimately inform policy decisions and/or promote government accountability.
- Due in large part to the formation of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership at the Urban Institute, which itself is made up of twenty-six projects throughout the country, over two-hundred indicators projects exist today.
indicator development and dissemination
- The way the community comes together varies from project to project, but typically involves repeated interaction and dialogue between various constituencies to reach agreement on common values and goals.
- The project coordinators then assemble data pertinent to each indicator and periodically publish reports containing their results.
ultimate goal
- The ultimate goal of indicators projects is to improve quality of life for residents of a community: by publishing measures of community performance, project supporters hope that the information captured in the indicators will change perceptions or behavior, or better inform policy-makers such that they introduce policies to improve performance on the indicators.
- “The ultimate goal of the social indicators movement is to achieve a systematic reduction of the burgeoning mass of social statistics into a subset that reflects the essential components of human well-being” (Rossi and Gilmartin 1980, p. xi).
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