Promoting Citizens as Partners for Better Governance
Enhancing social accountability by supporting decentralization and promoting citizens as partners for better governance is one of the four objectives of the World Bank Country Assistance Strategy. The World Bank Newsletter had an opportunity to interview Cyprian Fisiy, Social Development Sector Manager, about his work on social accountability and community empowerment.
Q. What is the meaning of social accountability and community empowerment for the World Bank?
A. Let me tell you where we are coming from in terms of social accountability and community empowerment. When we are investing in a given country, we want to show that the investment has positive impacts, particularly on the lives of the poor. So, for our purpose we are looking
at enabling the environment for those investments and assessing to what extent those investments are going to enhance the livelihood of the poor.
We are looking at the different levels of engagement. First is the policy level. We are looking at the law and enabling environment for citizens who have access to information, and we asked a question:
How do they access information? How do they use this information to make their choices and how do they use that information to be able to engage with the government, and to ensure that they have adequate services. So when we talk about social accountability, we are trying to see how services are delivered to the citizens.
When we talk about empowerment it is about the citizen’s voice, and those voices being heard and put in the planning process as well as in the implementation of those activities. So in that sense, we are looking at the importance of trying to address the demand side of governance to ensure the response to the citizen’s need.
Q. What are you trying to look at while you are in Cambodia?
A. We are trying to look at the ongoing decentralization and deconcentration program and law, and to see to what extent they going to improve the way of development which is being done by this country. The Minister of Interior is preparing a framework of decentralization of the organic law. So we look at how to contribute to this process and to see to what extent we can engage with the government.
We also look at the engagement and the relationship between the villagers and the commune council to find out what they need and what is happening: what the nature of the engagement is and what commitment they have for local governance.
Q. What were the findings?
A. There are some very important findings. The first is the broad openness to the fact that the government made the request to help them to frame the NGO law, the law on association and then we are going to work with the government to see to what extent the framework of the association law has been broadly consulted with civil society. There was demand for the Bank to work with the government to put in place this better law with more consultation with civil society.
Second, we see the increasing demand for access to information. There are some requests to us to help put in place a framework for the right access to information. We believe it is critical for engagement not only to have access to information, but to better analyze the information for people’s daily activities and to use this information better to access other resources either in the market or elsewhere.
Third, there are a lot of activities that have been done by NGOs in different settings. But these activities are not scaled up. Part of our challenges is to scale-up these activities. We build what is important as we move forward.
Four, lack of market access. Even though the citizens produce a lot of products and activities in the village, there is no link to national markets. And not enough is being sold in the local markets.
So we are asking why it is that in a country where most people are living in rural areas there is hardly any access to the market.
Q. What is the Bank going to do with its findings?
A. The Bank is going to engage at different levels. We work with the government and we engage the government and we will present the final finding to the government to see the opportunity for the Bank to help their work with citizens to reduce poverty in the country and to put in place a system for sustaining the investment. So we are working at three levels.
The first is with the donor community to ensure that we are all on the same page and we avoid the duplication of work. Second, we work with the Government to do what we can to help to improve the livelihood of citizens and as well to help develop the new decentralization and deconcentration program.
We believe that the policy framework of the Government needs to respond to the need of citizens. Third is to engage with citizens to ensure that their voices are being heard in the policy-making. So the connection between the Government and the citizens, for us, is very important.
Q. What would you recommend to improve social accountability and community empowerment?
A. Well, I think that in the first place we need to get some clarity that we are all on the same page – what we mean by social accountability. To do this, we need to engage the Government. It calls for a system where you get citizens to work closely with the Government to request better services, to ensure access to those services and also the quality of services.
We believe that by working on another level at the grassroots we will build the accountability back into the system – what we call social accountability, not public accountability. But, it complements public accountability. Avoiding duplication of the work of donors and also learning what is working well in Cambodia – to understand the local context.
Building institutional trust is also important. If there is trust, the engagement processes are much better. Looking at the access to justice, we understand that justice delivery is to be found mostly at the commune level, and we try to work on this solution and to have legal service centers at the commune level or to put in place paralegal services. We think that it is important in helping the government to show more responsibility to the poor.
(Source: The World Bank Newsletter, Volume 4, Number 1, January 2006)