MEASUREMENT AND ACCOUNTABILITY AT THE EXPO

One of the open house stations at the SpeakUpWinnipeg Expo focused on measurement and accountability.  Policies enabling sustainability indicators are included in both OurWinnipeg (02-1) and A Sustainable Winnipeg (06).  Measurement is identified as a “first step” (A Sustainable Winnipeg, 10), and is a key part of how OurWinnipeg will be implemented (04-1).

The conversation started at Expo will lead to the creation of a set of measures that are used to guide OurWinnipeg, to gauge progress and to enable continuous improvement.  It is anticipated that sustainability indicators will form part of OurWinnipeg progress reports.

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Different kinds or levels of measures will be helpful in understanding how we are moving towards our vision of a city that is “living and caring because we plan on staying”.  We need to understand the outputs and outcomes of specific City services and programs (sometimes called key performance indicators), but it is also important to understand how these measures are impacting the overall quality of life here – this requires looking at high-level outcomes.  We should be able to confirm that our actions today are contributing to community well-being today, and that this well-being can be sustained.

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Measuring community well-being is a complex task best handled as a community, since we all have a stake in it.  One approach to this task is to create a community indicator system.  The City of Winnipeg recently partnered with more than 40 community organizations, under the leadership of the United Way of Winnipeg and the International Institute for Sustainable Development, to create a pilot version of a community indicator system called “Peg”.  The beta version of this web-based measurement tool recently launched at www.mypeg.ca.   The collaboration enabled by participating in a community indicator system is an added benefit of this approach.

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The Expo began a conversation about the value of measurement and about which specific measures are important to the community.

The overall perspective of those who stopped to talk about the issue or who left written feedback (2 simple questions were asked:  “In your opinion what are the top 3 “must have” measures of Winnipeg’s sustainability?” And, “Do you have any other comments about measurement?”) seemed to be that while measurement was important in general, it is critically important to link outputs to outcomes, and especially to quality of life.

A wide variety of indicators were suggested as being very important.

The two areas mentioned most frequently were environmental indicators (energy, greenhouse gas emissions, land consumption or density, natural areas, greenspace) and mobility indicators (measures related to public transit quality and use, and to active transportation).

The other areas mentioned frequently were (and these are listed without any sense of priority/order):

• Housing – quantity, quality, variety/appropriateness
• Economy – employment, economic security, poverty
• Safety – personal safety, emergency/disaster preparedness
• Other social areas, many connected to “basic needs” – including specific mentions of indicators related to recreation, health, and food

What do you think?