A Report to the World Justice ProjectJim Parsons, Monica Thornton, Hyo Eun (April) Bang, Ben Estep, Kaya Williams, and Neil Weiner, members of the Altus Global Alliance.
In recent years, performance indicators have emerged as a promising tool for tracking progress in key areas of governance, including the rule of law. With support from the American Bar Association’s World Justice Project, the Vera Institute of Justice partnered with three fellow Altus Global Alliance members to develop a set of 60 rule of law indicators—concrete measures designed to assess an abstract concept—and test them in four cities: Chandigarh, India; Lagos, Nigeria; Santiago, Chile; and New York City, U.S. This six month pilot project complements the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index by adapting the detailed and comprehensive statement of legal standards it offers (i.e., de jure measures of rule of law) to largely de facto measures, rooted in United Nations covenants, that gauge how people experience the rule of law. These indicators draw on a range of data sources including the opinions of experts and members of the general public, information from the police, courts, prisons, and other institutions, NGO reports, and legislation. This pilot project shows that a single set of indicators can be flexible enough to be used in extremely diverse jurisdictions internationally yet concrete enough to be meaningful to local policy makers, justice system professionals, and members of civil society. Although the findings are preliminary and merit further analysis, our measures already suggest strengths and weaknesses of the rule of law in the four cities where they were tested. Moreover, we now know it is possible to develop and implement
rule of law indicators in a relatively short time. Other useful lessons emerged in the course of this project. We confirmed that local partnerships are essential to designing and implementing indicators to strengthen the rule of law. We also learned that, if sufficiently flexible, rule of law indicators can be used successfully even in so-called “data poor” environments. As we move beyond the pilot phase we will refine the indicators—eliminating or revising some and deciding which ones should receive greater weight. We aim to produce strong individual indicators that, when used in clusters, can reliably measure crucial aspects of the rule of law such as transparency, participation, and equal access to justice.
