Moving from Excellence Models of Local Service Delivery to Benchmarking ‘Good Local Governance’

Abstract

improvements. One important instrument of local government reforms has been benchmarking. Compared to the realm of national public administration, benchmarking at the local level is methodologically relatively easy and not as politically contentious. Local services are usually benchmarked against some generic excellence model or compared to the service provision of similar local authorities. However, most of the benchmarking criteria, models and methods which are currently available and which are being used to assess local service delivery no longer suit the needs of localities. Good local management implies high performance not only in managing local services so that they satisfy customers and taxpayers but also in enabling local communities to solve their own problems and to create better futures for their stakeholders. The article suggests that local government reforms need to go beyond the improvement of local service delivery. Calling upon the international experience of innovation in local governance, the article distils a series of benchmarking criteria which might be applied to define and identify ‘good local governance’.