Europe & Central Asia Regional Working Group Meeting – September 2026

LPSA’s Regional Working Group on Europe & Central Asia (ECA) aims to bring together government officials, policy practitioners, scholars, civil society organizations, and citizens who share an interest and expertise on decentralization, multilevel governance, intergovernmental relations, local governance and local development in ECA.

The next meeting organized by the ECA Regional Working Group is scheduled to take place on 30 September, 2026 (10:00 AM NYC, 3:00 PM UK, 4:00 PM CET, 7:00 PM UZT). Registration for this meeting is required.

Register Here! 

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Topic: Monitoring of Local Government Effectiveness and Efficiency in Providing Public Services

Local governments deliver many of the services that most directly shape people’s quality of life, yet central governments remain responsible for ensuring minimum service standards, equitable access, fiscal sustainability, and the effective implementation of national policies. The challenge is to exercise this responsibility without undermining local autonomy, encouraging compliance-oriented reporting, or imposing excessive administrative burdens.

This meeting will examine how central governments can develop monitoring arrangements that support quality local public services, as well as both accountability and continuous improvement in local public-service delivery. It will distinguish between:

• Effectiveness: whether services achieve their intended results, meet quality standards and reach the populations entitled to receive them; and
• Efficiency: whether local governments convert financial, human and physical resources into services and outcomes at reasonable cost.

International experience demonstrates several alternative approaches. Some countries maintain comprehensive national reporting systems that combine financial, staffing and service data. Others publish municipal service levels or compare expenditure with expected service outputs. Sector-led systems emphasize peer benchmarking and improvement, while newer outcome frameworks seek to reduce detailed reporting and focus central–local dialogue on a limited number of shared results.

The meeting will address five practical questions, grouped into two categories.

Objectives and usage of performance data

1. What should be measured? How should inputs, institutional capacity, service coverage, quality, cost, citizen experience and outcomes be combined to create meaningful composite scores?
2. How should results be used? When and how should monitoring lead to peer learning, technical support, financial incentives, enhanced oversight or corrective intervention?

Data collection, comparison and interpretation

1. How should municipalities be compared? How can population size, rurality, deprivation, geography, service responsibilities and other structural differences be reflected through peer groups or statistical-neighbour models?
2. How should data be collected and validated? Which information can come from administrative systems, financial accounts and regulators, and what must be reported by municipalities or obtained through citizen surveys?
3. How can local autonomy be protected and innovative initiative incentivized? How can local governments participate in choosing indicators, interpreting results and periodically revising the methodology? How can they be incentivized to adopt best practices and/or innovate?

The proposed result could be a short set of design principles for fair and useful local-government performance monitoring, together with practical recommendations. The workshop could help define a monitoring system that identifies areas of competence and local public services which need improvement, identifies risks, explains performance differences and triggers proportionate support and improvement.

Agenda:

1. Welcome & Introduction – Adrian Ionescu |Co-Chair LPSA ECA Regional Working Group| Technical Advisor, Public Administration UNDP Moldova
2. Benchmarking Local Government Performance in Estonia: The Minuomavalitsus.ee (“My Municipality”) Experience – Karl Annus| Project manager, Ministry of Regional Affairs and Agriculture
3. Know Your Municipality: municipal benchmarking as a driver of local performance dialogue in Denmark – Peter Riis |Chief Consultant, Economic Secretariat, KL – Local Government Denmark
4. Lithuania’s Approach to Measuring Quality of Life and Municipal Performance – Viktoras Sirvydis | Expert at Lithuania’s Central Project Management Agency (CPVA), Competence Center for Methodological Support
5. Methodology to assess the sustainability and institutional capacity of local governments in R.Moldova – Adrian Ionescu| Technical Advisor, Public Administration UNDP Moldova
6. What should a monitoring system take into account: observation from Hungary – Zsuzsanna Farkas| Head of Department, technical advisor Urban and Regional Development Deputy Secretariat, Ministry of Rural and Local Development
7. Q&A – Adrian Ionescu
8. Closing Remarks – Adrian Ionescu