Measuring for Decision Making: Soft and Hard Use of Indicators in Regional Development Policies

Topics

• Policies and instruments

Abstract

In the Italian Community Support Framework 2000-2006 comparable information sets at territorial level have been built to evaluate the territorial dimension of economic and social trends and to assess the quality of policy action, allowing to re-introduce in regional development policies the recursive sequence objectives/policy instruments/data. Nevertheless, due to incomplete information, policy objectives are difficult to translate into quantitative, verifiable measures; furthermore, it is very hard to establish the causality link between actions and objectives. The paper describes two Italian initiatives adopted in the use of indicators in regional development policies, where different approaches are required, according to the relevance of the two problems. In the first case, a set of territorial indicators – denominated “context indicators”, was chosen to describe final objectives; these are aimed at a soft use: better targeting policy actions, within a decision process involving both private and public actors, and broadly assessing their effectiveness. In the second case, where policy is aiming at explicit targets in terms of institution building, a hard use of indicators was adopted, conditioning financial sanctions and rewards to the attainment of quantified targets; in this case a “knowledge revealing mechanism”, based on partnership and interim monitoring, had to be establish, by which indicators were more clearly specified during policy implementation. The paper describes the strength and weakness of both systems of indicators and some lessons are drawn.

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