MEASURING INFORMATION EQUITY IN DEVOLVED GOVERNANCE: A REPRODUCIBLE INSTRUMENT FOR ASSESSING THE SUB-NATIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF OFFICIAL DEVELOPMENT COMMUNICATION

Development communication in devolved systems is distributed unevenly across sub-national units, but the unevenness is rarely measured. Auditing bodies report on the distribution of funds; no comparable instrument reports on the distribution of official communication about those funds — which counties are named, how often, and in what terms. This paper specifies a reproducible instrument for measuring that distribution. The instrument takes a corpus of dated official communication, resolves sub-national mentions against a fixed administrative gazetteer, and reports coverage as a concentration profile: mentions per unit, mentions per capita, a Lorenz curve and a Gini coefficient over units, and a coverage-gap list of units falling below a stated threshold over a stated window. The paper sets out the gazetteer construction, the mention-resolution rules including the treatment of ambiguous place names, the normalisation choices and their effects on the resulting coefficient, and a validation protocol based on cross-source agreement between independently collected channels. A preliminary application to a Kenyan corpus is reported as a feasibility check rather than as a substantive finding: two independently collected channels, analysed separately, produced concentration estimates agreeing to within 0.1 percentage points on the leading unit's share. The paper states explicitly what the instrument cannot support — it measures the distribution of communication, not the distribution of resources, service delivery, or attention, and no causal claim follows from a concentration figure alone. The instrument is offered for reuse by researchers, oversight institutions and civil society organisations working on access to information in devolved systems. Preprint, version 1.0.