A one-day conference entitled Evaluating Parliament: objectives, methods, results and impact was held in Geneva on 22 October 2009. It provided a forum for some 140 parliamentarians, Secretaries General and other parliamentary staff to share experiences of different approaches to the evaluation of parliament. It was the third annual conference co-organized by IPU and the Association of Secretaries General of Parliaments (ASGP).
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There was general agreement that it was necessary for parliaments to periodically evaluate the extent to which they are transparent, accessible, accountable and effective. Many of the questions centred on how best to organize such an evaluation. Participants learned of methods developed by the IPU, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, the Assemblée Parlementaire de la Francophonie and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. They also heard case studies of experiences in evaluation from the parliaments of Cambodia, Canada, Colombia and Pakistan.
There was lively discussion over the usefulness of quantitative and qualitative approaches to evaluation. Most participants felt that a purely numerical approach – counting parliamentarians’ attendance, the number of speeches made, etc. – could not provide an accurate picture of the work carried out in parliament. One central issue was what criteria to use in an assessment of parliament. No consensus has yet emerged on a common set of criteria or standards for democratic parliaments.
Participants highlighted the following problems as posing some of the major challenges to effective oversight in their parliaments:
- Lack of adequate numbers of skilled staff to support committees and individual members. This might reflect wider deficiencies in human and material resources, or the parliament’s lack of autonomy in determining its own budget and staffing, or both.
- Inadequate time and advance notice provided by the executive to enable effective scrutiny to take place, for example of the budget.
- Late, inadequate or irrelevant answers given to parliamentary questions.
- Complete absence of oversight of non-elected public bodies and key appointments to them.
Using assessment methodologies to identify problems is the first step towards setting objectives for parliamentary reform and development. A conference to be organized by UNDP and the World Bank Institute in 2010 will go a step further in sharing lessons learned in parliamentary evaluation and will look for signs of convergence among the emerging standards for democratic parliaments.
Documents from the 2009 conference are available on the IPU website.
