Does engaging Citizens for Development make a difference ?
A recent World Bank online course aims at demonstrating that citizen engagement can be a game changer for development. The course provides a deep understanding of citizen engagement in the context of development. While not a magic bullet, citizen engagement can be a key driver of change and fundamentally alter the relationship between the government and the governed.
Citizen engagement is indeed crucial for development. It is important and valuable on its own, as it represents a key component of human capability, as argued by Amartya Sen. This intrinsic value of citizen engagement is important because it helps to create citizens (John Gaventa, 2015) and it helps citizens to work together. Citizen engagement is key to strengthening governance processes and to deepening democracy, and it can be very important for helping those institutions to be accountable to the people they're meant to serve. In addition, citizen engagement also has an instrumental value, as a means to reach a variety of development goals ranging from poverty reduction, improving service delivery, infrastructures or government accountability. In the words of Matt Leighninger (2015), the public problems and challenges we face are daunting, but the capacity to address them are greater than ever because of the power of the citizens. Nabatshi (2015) states that the best way to reconcile public value pluralism, that exists in any society, would be one in which citizens are directly and actively involved in identifying what constitutes public value, articulating what needs to happen to create public value and prevent public values failure, and making decisions about trade-offs to achieve these ends.
But despite its importance for development, we still know very little about the type of intervention needed for citizen engagement to make a difference and have a greater socio-economic impact. In the context of democracies, citizen participation in government has traditionally centred on indirect participation through elections. While important, elections are clearly an insufficient long accountability route under increasing criticism for its limited efficiency (Van Reybrouck, 2014). Growing dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of elections in channelling citizen voices and engagement has led to increased reliance on other, perhaps more interactive mechanisms of engagement, based on increased dialogue, collaboration and participatory decision making among a diverse set of stakeholders, including both within civil society and the state (Rocha Menocal, 2015). Many complementary citizen engagement options exist and are increasingly being tested around the world to facilitate a shorter accountability route and support a more effective feedback loop and two-way flow of information between citizens and governments. They include community monitoring, social audits, participatory budgeting, public expenditure tracking survey, citizen report cards and surveys, etc.
But does citizen engagement really make a difference? There are an increasingly large number of successful examples of citizen engagement which do make a difference in influencing policies and improving services. Citizen engagement is a concept as old as humanity and was particularly developed in Ancient Greece. Sustained citizen engagement actually happens in the global South with, for example, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, or participatory constitution revision processes in South Africa, Kenya and Tunisia. Evaluations of those many experiments seem to suggest citizen engagement or social accountability can make a difference. But not under any condition. In its excellent analysis reviewing social accountability interventions Jonathan Fox (2014) unpacks some of the evidence. Fox states we need to go beyond the usual tactical approaches of citizen engagement and adopt strategic approaches which foster enabling environments for collective action, scale up citizen engagement beyond the local arena and attempt to bolster governmental capacity to respond to voice. It requires looking harder at the nature of citizen engagement actions, taking into account the enabling environment and government's incentives and capacity to respond to citizens. This is however often very difficult for development actors to undertake.
But however important, citizen engagement does not automatically lead to improved accountability and better decision making. Since citizen engagement is more of a socio-political nature than a technical process, there is no blueprint. Citizen engagement, to be efficient, must be context specific to understand what factors enable citizen engagement and influence impact. It is consequently crucial for development partners to invest in a better understanding of those socio-political factors at stake. The framework of citizen engagement (Grandvoinnet, 2015) as the interplay of 5 constitutive elements (citizen action, state action, civic mobilization, information and interface) is particularly relevant to unfold a context. According to Nabatshi (2015) the outcomes (good or bad) are, in part, a function of how public participation is designed. Thus, the question becomes how to design public participation processes to maximize the likelihood of identifying and understanding public values with regard to a particular policy issue or decision.
Information technology can definitely contribute to enhancing and facilitating citizen engagement. ICT can really support the two-way flow of information between citizens, civil society organizations on one hand and government, donors and service providers on the other. ICT can really facilitate the necessary move from a long accountability route to a shorter one where a citizen's role and involvement in public decision making is enhanced. By increasing transparency and accountability, ICT can both increase administrative efficiency and improve the interface between government and citizens. But ICT remains a means to an end. Projects and programmes must go beyond the access to technology to strengthen the capability of people to actually use ICTs in a meaningful way. So it really boils down to whether ICTs can provide people with new options, new opportunities and capabilities for economic and social development. This is far from an easy process as pointed out in the World Development Report (WDR) 2016 on digital dividends. Digital technologies too often fail to empower citizens. We need to avoid succumbing to a simplistic theory that greater connectivity equates to faster development and improved service delivery by the government. The WDR 2016 states that the transformation brought about by technology is conditional on the presence of complements, the most important for service delivery being good governance. In e-governance for improved services to the people, the key word remains governance. This should be an area of further research for the Belgian development agency BTC given the current political focus on Digitisation for Development (DfD).
In a nutshell, we note that citizen engagement can be incredibly powerful and hold incredible promise. Where it has worked well it can help deeply transform the very nature of government, the very nature of the relationship between governments and their citizens. But experiences teach us that meaningful citizen engagement is very hard to do well and it is still very much a learning process. ICT can help but not without improving governance.
References
- Alina Rocha Menocal, 'Citizen Engagement: Theories and Mechanisms'. Citizen engagement, a game changer for development?, Word Bank, 2015
- Helene Grandvoinnet, 'Context and the Enabling Environment'. Citizen engagement, a game changer for development?, Word Bank, 2015
- John Gaventa, 'Rethinking The Evidence: Tactical vs. Strategic Approaches', Citizen engagement, a game changer for development?, Word Bank, 2015
- Jonathan Fox, 'Social Accountability, what does the evidence really say ? 'GPSA Working paper series, 2014
- Matt Leighninger, 'How Citizen Engagement Improves Policymaking'. Citizen engagement, a game changer for development?, Word Bank, 2015
- Rakesh Rajani, 'The Role of Citizen Engagement in Service Delivery'. Citizen engagement, a game changer for development?, Word Bank, 2015
- Tina Nabatchi, 'Strategies for Recruitment and Participation'. Citizen engagement, a game changer for development?, Word Bank, 2015
- Van Reybrouck David, "Contre les Elections". 2014
- World Development Report 2016 "Digital dividends", World Bank 2016
Citizen engagement gives ownership , that helps to acheive results and makes the results sustainable
This quite interesting when my country started a devolved system of government four years ago and let the people make decisions on what they wanted that is participatory planning. We have achieved more than what the country achieved in the last fifty years of independence. It works almost like magic.
I could not agree more with Mr. Charlier that citizen engagement is crucial for development (in fact engagement is a major reason for development) and also for enhanced governance. I also agree completely that the design of citizen engagement approaches is crucial to success. When citizens have appropriate tools to help them focus on the results they really want while at the same time understanding very well the current situation, they are energized to connect and collaborate with goverment to make major changes. Civil society is not, by the way, limited to formal organizations, which often do not exist in developing or transitional countries or if they do, are often artificially generated through grants, etc. Ordinary citizens can work in ad hoc groups to achieve major change -- as was demonstrated by communities engaged in social and economic development of Albania in the CESEDA project from 2003 to 2005. A report card process, followed by results-focused action planning enabled 50 communities to collaborate with government to complete 58 major community improvements -- and built capacity for the communities to continue with their efforts after project completion.
Hi there Leonardo. Its your old pal Jenna from UNCDF. I still work on these same 'active citizenship' issues...in a few weeks I'll be in W. Africa. Hope you are well.