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quality and utility in establishing rough baselinesfor governance among the nations of the world;they are not sufficiently developed to be of greatvalue in measuring changes in the political or legalstatus of a country’s poor men and women overtime. They are also highly aggregate and thus oflimited utility in ascertaining empowerment in aparticular sub-national community or region.While not perfect, perhaps the best example ofinternational indexes relevant to Legal Empowermentof the Poor is the World Bank’s GovernanceResearch Indicator series. These are based onseveral hundred individual variables measuringperceptions of governance. They are organised intosix categories: rule of law, lack of political violence,quality of the regulatory framework, efficiency ofthe bureaucracy, control of corruption and accountabilityof the political leaders. 11 The World Bank’sdata have their uses but must be applied verycautiously in development work (Arndt and Oman2006). The Eurostat/UNDP (2004) users’ guide togovernance indicators describes at length the applicationsand limitations of several of the leadingoff-the-rack governance data series.Pending reliable pre-existing empirical informationon national or local-level legal empowerment,Legal Empowerment of the Poor programmemesand projects will have to develop and use their ownmetrics for evaluating the socio-economic environmentand gauging accomplishments, based onsurveys and interviews, as discussed above. RuthAlsop and Nina Heinsohn (2006) report to theWorld Bank on one such analytic framework thatcan be used to measure and monitor empowermentprocesses and outcomes. Kucera et al. (2007) putforward indicators that have been tested for measuringvarious aspects of decent work. (See Annex3 for a list of readymade indicators.)5. Monitoring andEvaluationBecause action planning and progress monitoring(the final row in Table 5.11) has not beendiscussed much in these pages, and becausethis function is especially important for outsideagencies, some of its tools are worth looking at abit more closely. Brinkerhoff and Crosby (2002)identify four components to establish an efficientparticipatory and country-driven policy monitoringsystem:1. A management information system based ontargeted indicators endorsed by national stakeholders.2. Stakeholder monitoring to identify the responsesof those that benefited or those that lost fromthe policy reform measures.3. Problem-solving studies to devise tailored andpractical solutions to implementation issues.4. Process and impact evaluations to supportlearning over time.Best practices recommend that the design of eachcomponent should be based on the principlesof adaptation to user needs and availability ofresources, user participation, parsimony (the leastamount of information and cost required to accomplishthe task), and simplicity. To address boththe content and process sides in monitoring policyimplementation, it is important to understand fullywhat needs to be monitored.Lessons learned from country experiences have ledto the following practical suggestions for monitoringpolicy reform implementation, according toBrinkerhoff and Crosby (2002):1. Define a list of steps, processes, targets andmilestone events in the reform process. Thiswill enable the breakdown of the policy processesinto a series of components to enable329