Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine bottom-up and community led approaches to generating local development indicators. It uses case studies from the local sphere in South Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa to gain insights into how community led indicators advance the democratisation of welfare programmes.

Paper long abstract:

Three-quarters of a century on from the first welfare policy programmes set out in a post WWII world, we have come a long way with measuring, with an increase in indicators for measuring human development outcomes. Among these new measures, is the set of self-reporting instruments, e.g., social audit schemes and household evaluation/testing kits, that have important consequences for the democratisation of development.

This emphasis on democratisation resonates strongly with the centrality of justice, a core tenet in the capability approach. The considerable potential for an overlap between subjective well-being and capabilities has become a subject of considerable interest in recent years (Binder, 2014) and provides the starting point for this paper. The intention of this paper is to examine bottom-up and community led approaches to generating local development indicators. This examination will be using case studies from the local sphere in South Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa to gain insights into how bottom-up data collection could generate community led indicators. The results of the case studies will facilitate a better understanding of how an increasingly democratisation of local development processes could both provide methods of triangulating existing development measures as well as improve currently available indicators. The evaluation of these case studies has important implications for how developing countries could advance social justice in a manner that are currently being investigated in high-income countries (Biedenweg, 2017). The possibility of comparing indicators generated through bottom-up approaches in developing countries with those in OECD and other high-income country contexts provides a 21st century update to the original narrow income-based measures that were proposed at the beginning of post-war development.