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Project implemented with the support of the European Commission

2008 - 2010

2010 ACTION PLAN

1. Helping localities to construct robust information systems

This part of the project will review local information systems (the way data is collected, analysed and used for policy making) in partner localities, provide recommendations for improvement and distil good principles for constructing local information systems. This will be based on the analysis of information you collect or which is easily available from other (national or international) sources.

The work in 2006-2009 helped to identify some initial core elements of robust information systems or ‘landscapes’. These are presented in four components of ‘information landscapes’ with aspects of good practice highlighted for each of them:

• The information ‘supply-chain’, which determines the information that is available to construct indicators, and to inform policy and strategy. Good information supply chains build data locally, are based on micro data that can be processed according to local information needs and use of national data primarily as a reference base.
• The ‘information governance’ which involves the factors that control and constrain what the local areas can do with information once it is collected. Good information governance statistically empowers local areas and provides policy-focused information, rather than simply generates funding driven information.
• ‘Analysis / Value-Adding’ comprises the actions that take place to process information into intelligence and knowledge. Good analysis/value adding understands comparator areas and represents data limitations.
• The ‘Consumption’ component describes how the resulting knowledge is ‘consumed’ at all levels of the organisation and beyond by other actors. Good information consumption evaluates information in a critically constructive way.

Working method

Project partners:  The project will involve, in addition to the existing 10 Pilot and Observer localities, 4 new partners: local development organisations with a strong responsibility in strategy making or implementation (regional development agencies, sub-national authorities).

Activities: the partner localities will host a 1 day workshop to:

• Review the information systems in place and identify areas for improvement;
• Identify the local policy instruments for which measured impact information is available to assess their success;
• Review the indicators in place to measure economic performance and policy impacts in 4 policy areas (Improving skills and human capital; Reducing poverty and social exclusion; Fostering entrepreneurship culture, start-ups and self-employment; Supporting innovation). 

Participation benefits and requirements: by participating in the FIELD project your organisation will benefit from: 

Project partner localities will be required to:

• Provide support in organising a 1 day project workshop; 
• Complete a project fiche (information on the data you collect and use in policy making and examples of successful projects for which measured impact information is available);
• Provide a financial contribution of 5,000€ to cover the costs of visiting, advising and reporting on the locality.

2. LEED indicators

This part of the project will address the need faced by many local policy makers to determine (in the vast amounts of national and local data and information) some core indicators that can help link data to local drivers of growth and link policy to drivers. The quality of indicators for local economic and employment development is inevitably the result of a trade-off between the components of statistical quality on the one hand, involving scale, relevance, accuracy, timeliness, coherence and consistency, and interpretability on the other. To these issues we also can add the consideration of cost-benefits (policy benefits weighed against investment costs and overall administrative burden) incurred in collecting data and developing.

Activities: 4 thematic seminars will be organised at the OECD Headquarters in Paris gathering a selected group of international experts and practitioners from partner localities to review the indicators in place and identify sets of indicators that can be used by local development organisations to better measure performance and policy impacts in the following fields:

1. Measuring skills and human capital (seminar to be held on 12th March 2010);

2. Reducing unemployment, poverty and social exclusion (21st June 2010);

3. Fostering entrepreneurship culture, start-ups and self-employment (September 2010);

4. Measuring local development policy delivery (4 November 2010).

Download the description of the project

For further information on participation

Please contact Jonathan Potter or Ekaterina Travkina