Measuring governance, democracy and participation: Lessons from two decades of experience in Peru

This paper presents Peru’s unique experience in measuring governance through household surveys. Launched at the initiative of the authors in the early 2000s, and coordinated since then by one of them, this survey module is, to the best of our knowledge, the most ambitious (in terms of the length of series, statistical properties, ownership) ever carried out on a global scale by a national institute of statistics (INEI). The Peruvian experience has contributed to both demonstrating the validity of the approach chosen to measure governance, prior to the adoption of SDG 16 in 2015, and supporting the regular production of indicators on governance, primarily those of SDG 16. The first part provides a brief overview of the Peruvian context and demonstrates the importance of monitoring governance issues in general, and in this country in particular. In the second part, we describe the main methodological options and innovations adopted by INEI since the launch of the module. The third part illustrates the analytical potential of the approach based on a few empirical examples, while the fourth part presents various ways through which the data has been used so far and some institutional challenges faced in promoting the use of governance statistics. Finally, we conclude by drawing key lessons from this initiative and outlining prospects for the future.