2005, The World Bank
The World Bank has increasingly focused on decentralization, local government reform, and civic participation to enhance development effectiveness. This approach is based on significant conceptual, empirical, and policy-related work on why top-down development approaches alone are insufficient and why combined government and citizen effort can advance poverty reduction. For example, the World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People investigates how countries can accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals by improving service delivery for poor people. The report states that service provision falls short because of weak incentives for performance, corruption, imperfect, or nonexistent monitoring, and administrative logjams. In many cases such failures are due to a lack of social accountability—an approach towards building accountability which relies on civic engagement.
Some countries have tried to address the problem by involving poor people in service delivery and the results have been remarkably positive. Giving parents greater influence over their children’s education, enabling patients to have a say over hospital management, or publishing public agency budgets in local newspapers all contribute to improving outcomes in human development. Increasingly, countries open up national budgets for public scrutiny, and encourage the independent oversight of public resources, as in the case of the multi-stakeholder monitoring committee of oil revenues in Chad. Installing these types of accountability mechanisms, wherein power holders including poor and disenfranchised groups report downward to citizens, is an important method of empowerment and sustainable governance. This is equally crucial in policy making as in service provision.
This conceptual paper and learning tool are the next rather than final step to improve our understanding of how government and civil society can co-produce more effective goods and services. The inclusion of the learning module, which can and should be adapted by local trainers for application in different contexts, puts the concepts into an accessible format and provides local actors with tools to readily initiate dialogue on these important issues.
