John Clark: Governance is Everybody’s Business
Tuesday, October 6, 2009 6:44The World Bank launched its Program to Enhance Capacity on Social Accountability (PECSA) on December 3, 2007. The World Bank Newsletter had an opportunity to interview Mr. John Clark, Lead Social Scientist and PECSA’s Task Team Leader, about this new program.
Q. What does Social Accountability mean?
A. Social accountability really means everything that citizens can do beyond voting that helps and encourages
their government to be more accountable; it also includes the activities that government and civil society organizations can take to give opportunities for their citizens to become involved in these activities.
Q. That describes Social Accountability in a general way. Would you mind giving us specific conditions for it?
A. Yes, social accountability is about citizens truly being involved in the process of governing. For this it is first necessary for the government to be prepared to listen to their citizens; which means freedom of speech, and freedom of citizens to come together to form associations, so they can think about what their concerns are. It is also necessary to have the right sort of culture in which senior government officials are truly prepared to listen to what people at grassroots really think about the issues that affect to their lives. You need the right culture and the right legal environment.
Q. Now, on Monday December 3rd, this new program is called Program for Enhancing Capacity Building for Social Accountability – PECSA. What is that?
A. In Cambodia, the government says they want more partnership with civil society, it recognizes that governance is a top priority for development in Cambodia, and it recognizes that problems of governance will not be solved by the government acting alone: it needs the donors, private sector, and civil society. When you talk to civil society organizations, they also say ‘We think governance problems are big problems in Cambodia and we really want to do something to help tackle them, but we don’t know what to do.’ We find that in other countries there is a very rich experience among civil society organizations about helping citizens make their voices heard and their experiences known – to help the governments tackle these deep-rooted problems of governance.
With PECSA what we are seeking to do is to help accelerate the arrival of these experiences - what we call social accountability – into Cambodia. This is what we mean by capacity building - helping organizations develop the skills and approaches that have proven effective elsewhere and apply them in Cambodia.
Q. We talk about PECSA. What is PECSA going to do to make this program happen, and how?
A. Well, PECSA has two main elements. One is training and mentoring in which we focus primarily on importing experiences from two countries, India and the Philippines, where social accountability practices are much more advanced than in Cambodia. This entails bringing practitioners with these experiences from those two countries to Cambodia to provide intensive training here.
The second is a mentoring scheme whereby organizations in Cambodia can be twinned with counterparts in India or the Philippines to get on the job advice and guidance to help them plan how they can really help the government more effectively tackle these governance problems.
Third, there will be study tours for people here, including government officials, perhaps, to go and see how organizations in India and Philippines work together to tackle these problems with government. Fourth, there will be grants - grants to organizations here in Cambodia to help them pilot or build up social accountability tools that have proven effective elsewhere and develop them for the Cambodian context.
Q. You mentioned India and Philippines. Can you tell us the names of some organizations in India or the Philippines and what they are doing?
A. Yes, we have two main partners; one is called Participatory Research in Asia, based in India; and the other is the Ateneo School of Government based in Manila, in the Philippines. These organizations we selected, not just because they are leaders in social accountability themselves but because they are the centers of national level networks, bringing all the practitioners together.
For example, in the Philippines, the Transparency and Accountability Network focuses on problems at schools and the reason why children are not getting textbooks on time. What they did was monitor all the government production of textbooks, and they found that 40 percent of textbooks that were produced didn’t arrive at proper destinations.
Some of the cause was corruption, but a lot of it was just error.
The organization teamed up with the boy scout and girl scout movements; hundreds of volunteers walked from distribution points to the warehouses and from warehouses to schools and then they found out where text books were going and where the error was occurring. They also found that textbooks were falling apart because they were improperly printed. So it led to pressure on the company producing the textbooks and encouragement for the Ministry of Education to do a better job.
As a result, the average price of textbooks fell by more than 50 percent and the time of delivering textbooks to schools was cut from 24 months to 12 months. Without the information coming from the grassroots level, it would not have been possible for the government to achieve the transformation that they did.
Q. From your experiences, who should be involved in making this program effective?
A. Well, we need the involvement of everybody. Governance is everybody’s business, as with the example I just gave about school textbooks in the Philippines. What we are looking at is the role of NGOs and other civil society organizations to go out and to help citizens at the grassroots level to know more about their opportunities to help the government become more effective. We look at the role media can play to disseminate the information that really empowers citizens to play more active roles in the area of governance. We also looking at the private sector helping to monitor what is going on at the local level or national level.
So I think that civil society, media, private sector and citizens themselves all play an important role in improving governance.
Q. If you were asked to give your top three recommendations to make Social Accountability work effectively, what would you recommend?
A. My first recommendation would be to senior people in government, to say when you look at your staff’s performance, one question you should ask is how much time do they spend talking to citizens and civil society organizations to find out what is really happening at the grassroots level.
My second recommendation is to big NGOs in Phnom Penh. What we found in the civil society assessment that we are just concluding is that many NGOs are not widely known outside Phnom Penh, and many of them are not seen as providing information to the people at the community level. So I would say to them, give more attention to providing information to local people that they really need. By the way, we also want to see the government expand the amount of its information that it makes available to the public.
My third recommendation is to build coalitions. Citizens should be powerful actors in a democracy, but in Cambodia there is a weak connection between them and decision-makers in local or national government. What I would like to see is a strengthening of each link in the chain connecting citizens with decision-makers. That means building coalitions of local associations, linking these to networks at the district and provincial levels and then building the national coalitions. And then these need to find effective forums for truly engaging with senior people in government. Then you would have a solid chain connecting the citizens and policy makers.
Q. What result do you expect to see in the next three years?
A. We would like to see upward of 50 organizations develop new programs of SA – Social Accountability – using both grants that the PESCA program offers and the training program and mentoring arrangements that PECSA will offer and taking advantage of the National Social Accountability Network that we are developing.
We are introducing a new series of what we call Social Accountability Schools. These will be intensive 3-week training programs. We hope NGOs and other civil society actors, media, and perhaps government, will attend them. They will comprise a series of modules that we hope civil society will benefit from and apply in their organizations. Following this they will be given field assignments and distant learning programs through all of which they will be able to get a diploma in social accountability.
By the end of three years, maybe 50 to 60 people will receive such a diploma. And we may take this a step further; since we are linked to the Ateneo School of Government, we can also develop this diploma into a masters program on social accountability.
Q. What money is available for the program?
A. We have $2 million from the World Bank’s own resources – a fund set up for countries emerging from major conflicts. This funding is for two years. Within two years, we will develop a large project called the Demand for Good Governance (DFGG) project that has some activities with government and also some $4 million set aside
for activities with civil society and others. So we intend that PECSA will start the ball rolling, operating with the World Bank’s own money initially, but after that, similar activities will be funded through DFGG. Therefore, this program is going to be at least four or five years.
(Source: The World Bank’s Newsletter: volume 6, number 1, January 2008)