Metagora: An experiment in the measurement of democratic governance

Abstract

Today more and more institutional actors are turning toward applied statistics and quantitative indicators as a means for developing an evidence-based assessment of human rights implementation, democratic processes, and improvement of governance. A notable set of human rights institutions, international organizations, development agencies, national policy makers, and civil society are looking for reliable figures and robust analysis that will empower their work in the fields of monitoring, reporting, advocacy, or policy design. Even if their growing interest for quantitative methods is neither universally shared nor clearly defined with regard to the scope and effective application of those methods, their interest attests to an increased awareness of the need for proper and robust tools that would enhance the reliability, the comprehensiveness, and the efficiency of existing reporting and monitoring mechanisms. Such an increased awareness is leading to new and promising forms of collaboration between statisticians, human rights practitioners, and institutional actors-a collaboration that marks a significant difference from the reluctance and lack of communication that prevailed during last decades. Indeed, the feasibility and relevance of "measuring" human rights, democracy, and governance have long been controversial both in the human rights community and also in the international statistical community. The potential of statistical analysis for enhancing rigor and reliability of reporting on human rights was first evidenced by pioneering studies and work undertaken in the 1980s, in particular by David Banks, Richard Claude, Thomas Jabine, and Herbert Spirer, as well as by a series of successful projects conducted in the 1990s in different countries by the statisticians of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Human Rights Program.1 Nevertheless, it was only in 2000 that the issue was broadly debated on the occasion of the Montreux Conference on Statistics, Development and Human Rights, attended by policy analysts, human rights practitioners, professional statisticians, and governmental officials from 123 countries and 35 international organizations.2 As a consequence of that conference, a multi-disciplinary North/South network emerged, expanded, and gave impetus to a series of international workshops and consultations on the expected tangible follow-up to theMontreux "operational conclusions."3 This process led to the design of Metagora, an international project focusing on methods, tools, and frameworks for enhancing evidence-based assessment of democracy, human rights, and governance. The project was hosted by PARIS21, within the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and, thanks to the support of a community of institutional donors,4 it started operations in February 2004. Even though Metagora was limited in scope-involving six projects during this pilot phase-it successfully reached its ambitious goal of designing, organizing, and implementing all planned field operations within a year. It was then able to produce, review, and deliver its first results in a Metagora Forum held in Paris in May 2005. Final reports on the pilot phase of Metagora have been presented by the end of 2006. A second phase for the project has found initial financing for the period 2007-2010. This chapter focuses on the context and policy incidence of the Metagora experience of "measuring human rights." It intends to (i) describe the specific Metagora approach and method of work (in Sections 8.2 and 8.3); (ii) comment on some significant lessons of the project and on a few perspectives that have been opened by it (in Sections 8.4 and 8.5); (iii) advocate for a strong integration of the human rights and democracy dimensions into governance indicators and discuss the factors that lead to successful integration of those dimensions (in Sections 8.6-8.9); (iv) elaborate on how and why international aggregate indicators and national statistics-based indicators are complementary (in Section 8.10); and (v) briefly point out some strategic steps that must be taken in the short and medium term (Section 8.11). © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.