Can Scorecards Improve Municipal Government Performance? A Field Experiment

• In Event: Information and Perceptions

Abstract

Local government dysfunction can have disproportionate consequences for people in low-income countries. If local governments fail to provide schools and health centers with the necessary supplies, children cannot learn and patients suffer. If broken boreholes are not repaired, people have to walk hours to get fresh water. Local government inaction on these issues is often blamed on information and coordination problems within local administrations. We test this hypothesis through a field experiment in 140 municipalities in Burkina Faso: Can municipal decision makers can be “nudged” to fix bottlenecks in municipal service delivery, by informing them about performance shortfalls and facilitating the internal assignment of responsibilities? Together with the government of Burkina Faso, we developed an annual municipal government performance monitoring system. The system tracks 18 key indicators that correspond to national norms for municipal service delivery and institutional capacity. In 70 treatment municipalities, local decision makers were provided with a scorecard that visualized bottlenecks in their service delivery performance and institutional capacity. Performance shortfalls were explained to municipal decision makers and they were asked to internally assign responsibilities for each indicator. The intervention thus consisted of three elements: (1) Providing information on performance targets and performance shortfalls, (2) creating a sense of being externally monitored, and (3) facilitating the internal assignment of responsibilities. While the information provided by the scorecard was new to most local decision makers, we find that the scorecards were nevertheless insufficient to evoke improvements in municipal government performance. We discuss the potential reasons and the scope for complementary and alternative interventions to address bottlenecks in municipal government performance.

Authors

• Malte Lierl, German Institute of Global and Area Studies

• Marcus Holmlund, The World Bank