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November 10, 2022: Carmen Navarro Lecture
Lecture
Measuring Local Autonomy in 57 Countries: The Local Autonomy Index (LAI)
Thursday, November 10, 2022 · 3:00–4:30pm · SSC 6210
In the last few decades, local autonomy has become one of the key issues of reforms of local government systems and has been advocated by many international institutions as a cornerstone of “good governance” (UN-Habitat, Council of Europe, UCLG, OECD). There have been several attempts to measure local autonomy empirically and from a comparative perspective, the most recent of which is the Local Autonomy Index (LAI). Drawing on different theoretical paradigms (institutional theories, comparative local and multilevel governance, theories of decentralization), the LAI proposes a rooted measure of local autonomy based on 7 dimensions and 11 variables, and applies it to 57 countries (primarily European and OECD countries), assessing their local autonomy levels from 1990 to 2020.
Carmen Navarro is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She is a member of European research networks that analyze and survey local governments in their different dimensions (leaders, institutional reforms, public services, local autonomy, etc.). She is one of the authors of the Local Autonomy Index.