Executive Summary

The need for trust and good governance culture, as the enabler of trust, is increasing in a transforming world. Metropolitan cities house densely populated areas, intense economic activity, huge infrastructure investments, cultural diversity and international interaction. We as Argüden Governance Academy have developed an innovative model to support and improve governance culture in metropolitan cities. This generic model can be globally applicable.

The Metropolitan Municipality Governance Scorecard (MMGS) model has been developed based on good governance principles. The model primarily aims to enable citizens to monitor the quality of municipal governance through publicly available information provided by metropolitan municipalities. The model helps citizens to understand and analyze holistically how and where the resources of the municipality have been utilized in a detailed manner from a governance perspective. The model is an oversight tool to review how the delegated authority (through the ballot box) has been used by decision-makers. The MMGS model allows citizens to observe the quality of the implementation of governance principles of transparency, accountability, representation and participation, inclusiveness and fairness, responsibility and responsiveness, effectiveness and efficiency, and consistency.

MMGS’s most important benefit is to allow citizens to assess the quality of implementation of good governance principles by metropolitan municipalities. MMGS also supports metropolitan municipalities in self-assessing, benchmarking, and determining improvement areas in their governance practices. A system of best practices of metropolitan municipalities encourages them to learn from one other. An improvement in good governance practices in municipalities helps increase the citizens’ trust in their institutions. The improvement of good governance practices is expected to lead to the utilization of resources and authority in a sustainable and inclusive manner. The model is intended as a tool that encourages improvement in the following areas for metropolitan municipalities:

• Quality of life,
• Sustainable development,
• Inclusiveness and cooperation and
• Quality of relations and institutional effectiveness and efficiency.

MMGS has been used to review the governance quality of twenty-seven metropolitan municipalities in Türkiye. The data has been collected through 337 indicators by using publicly available information in digital media. The analysis of data has shown that the adoption level of good governance practices by 27 metropolitan municipalities has ranged from 35% to 74%. The findings have shown there is an important improvement opportunity for each of the metropolitan municipalities. It has been understood in the research that each analyzed municipality has good governance practices. These good practices have been collected in a pool which could be used as a learning tool from others. The analysis results have confirmed that the model is running effectively and efficiently.

Solid recommendations for taking action to improve governance quality in metropolitan areas have been delivered for different groups of metropolitan municipalities, citizens, central government, civil society organization and other stakeholders. The findings have shown that all stakeholders need to take action to strengthen governance quality for better metropolitan governance.

We believe that analyzing the adoption level of good governance culture and practices by metropolitan municipalities through citizens’ perspective (lens) would help to strengthen improvement of good governance practices in these institutions. We think that the model could be considered as an innovative tool for monitoring, analyzing, and improving governance quality and practices in metropolitan municipalities. We think that the model would be an example for monitoring and measuring the governance quality in metropolitan municipalities all around the world.