Dr Paolo Dardanelli and Kieran Wright, University of Sheffield have developed a metric for assessing how far power is decentralised across different scales, geographies and policy areas commissioned by the Local Democracy Research Centre (LDRC). The LDRC bring together experts from local government and academia to do practical research on some of the key challenges for local democracy.
In the study the authors have assessed existing metrics, which tend to gloss over the range and complexity within local government systems and built an alternative model to address this gap, testing it through interviews and a workshop with LGIU member councils in England
In the first of two papers Dardanelli and Wright scoped out the issues and challenges, appraising current approaches and begun to applying them in practical contexts.
In the second they look at the challenges we face in developing measures that will capture the diversity and nuances of the governance system, discussing possible ways of dealing with those challenges, focussing on the policy sphere.