Citizens evaluating local services and facilities in Southern Italy

Objectives

The objective of this initiative is to improve the quality of public services and citizen engagement by involving citizens and associations in the evaluation of service quality, using the citizen’s point of view as a starting point for the prioritisation of service improvements.

Other expected benefits are

• improved partnership working between individual citizens, civic associations and public agencies;
• increased transparency about the performance of local authorities;
• increased knowledge of citizens about the activities of local authorities, by achieving a close partnership between them;
• detailed information, from the citizen’s point of view, about which public services are most in need of prompt improvements;
• increased social capital at local level, as the citizen evaluators work together to agree on an overall assessment of the services and draft improvement plans;
• increased identity with the local area and ownership of improvement initiatives by encouraging citizens to keep an “open eye” on what is happening in the local area.

Moreover, as the initiative produces data on the actual quality of public services, it supplements data from customer satisfaction surveys and helps to produce an integrated information system on service quality.

Laura Massoli provided Governance International with this case study on 30 July 2010. It was updated on 17 February 2012.