Designing the Public Sector Capabilities Index — testing our approach with city governments
By Bec Chau
What makes a city government adaptable? The answer doesn’t come from theory alone but from the people managing complexity every day. The Public Sector Capabilities Index is taking shape through deep engagement with city governments, ensuring it reflects the challenges, constraints, and opportunities they navigate.
Over the past 18 months, we’ve worked with 20 city governments to understand how they adapt to challenges, shaping a grounded approach to assessing dynamic capabilities — specifically, their ability to adjust activities, resources, processes, and teams to tackle current challenges and emerging vulnerabilities. These insights have informed a draft assessment methodology that resonates with the practical realities of city officials. As we engage with many more cities, we continue refining this approach to ensure the index is both rigorous and relevant.
To find out more about where we are in the project, delve into what we have learned, what we are doing, and what we still do not know.
Testing the approach to assessing dynamic capabilities
Assessing dynamic capabilities in city governments globally is a challenge. Every engagement refines our understanding, sharpening both the concepts and questions used to assess them. Together, we explore how to cultivate an adaptive and dynamic city government. By engaging with governments in varied settings, we move beyond a single administrative tradition or context, aiming to create an approach relevant across diverse urban governance models.
Through collaborative workshops, we aim to:
- Gather preliminary data on the strengths and weaknesses of dynamic capabilities within the city government
- Collect feedback on the assessment questions
- Develop a compelling value proposition for the index
What city governments gain from engaging
We tailor our engagement to each city government’s unique context. Many have noted the value of creating a reflective space that fosters cross-organisational dialogue on capabilities. Others seek to leverage the workshop to enrich internal strategy development or spark discussions on strengthening capabilities within their organisation.
After the workshop, each city government receives:
- A preliminary assessment of their dynamic capabilities
- Inclusion in the first iteration of the Public Sector Capabilities Index
- An opportunity to share learnings with other city governments
A peek inside the workshops
So far, we’ve held workshops in Arequipa, Seattle, Álvaro Obregón, and Bratislava. In the coming months, we’ll engage with Glasgow, Vilnius, Malmö, Aarhus, São Paulo, New Orleans, Durham, seven city governments in Brazil, fourteen city governments in Finland, and many more.
Here’s what happens during these sessions:
- Sharing Insights — We introduce the five dynamic capabilities and bring them to life with stories from other cities.
- Understanding Your City Government — City officials share insights about their governance, challenges, and the changes shaping their work.
- Testing the Assessment — We test the assessment by exploring key questions for each capability: how it’s practiced, the evidence for outcomes, and funding sources. We reflect on the clarity of questions, identify the right respondents, and evaluate the feasibility of evidencing outcomes.
- Exploring Impact — After engaging with the assessment, we explore who within the city government and its stakeholders might benefit, the actions insights could spark, and their potential impact.
All of these elements inform the index prototype and guide further development.
For a closer look at the workshops in action, read more about our workshop with the Provincial Municipality of Arequipa in Peru.
What’s next?
Each session deepens our understanding of dynamic capabilities and informs the Public Sector Capabilities Index. Engaging in the development of the index ensures that the design aligns with each city government’s needs, while its eventual implementation will support the actions and outcomes they seek to achieve. As we continue to refine the assessment approach and gather data on each city government, we move closer to releasing the index prototype later this year.
If you’d like to learn more about the Public Sector Capabilities Index or share feedback on the assessment, contact Bec Chau at rebecca.chau.22@ucl.ac.uk.
