Improving local democracy through ELoGE: Time’s good governance journey in Norway

Objectives

ELoGE stands for the European Label of Governance Excellence, an initiative of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg to promote the ‘Strategy for Innovation and Good Governance’. The tool was launched in 2008 to provide the 48 Member States of the Council of Europe with an assessment framework to promote good governance in local government. ELoGE is based on a common vision of good governance which is expressed in 12 good governance principles agreed by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. These principles are:

1. Fair conduct of elections, representation and participation
2. Responsiveness
3. Efficiency and effectiveness
4. Openness and transparency
5. Rule of law
6. Ethical conduct
7. Competence and capacity
8. Innovation and openness to change
9. Sustainability and long-term orientation
10. Sound financial management
11. Human rights, cultural diversity and social cohesion
12. Accountability

Based on these 12 principles, the Centre for Local Democracy of the Council of Europe developed three sets of questionnaires to assess the state of good governance from the perspective of three stakeholders, including:

• Local officers
• Citizens
• Local councillors

Local authorities wishing to obtain ELoGE certification have a site visit by external evaluators to verify the results provided by a self-assessment done by the local authority. If the scoring of the external assessment meets a predefined minimum standard for each of the 12 good governance principles, the ELoGE certificate is awarded.

For Time municipality the key objective of piloting ELoGE was to gain new insights from working with such a comprehensive tool. At the same time, gaining the external certification was seen as important in motivating everybody involved to invest time, resources and commitment in delivering the resulting improvement action plans.