Transparency and Accountability the Key Demands for World Bank-Supported Good Governance Project
Monday, December 8, 2008 13:50The World Bank has held its first Social Accountability School in Cambodia. The school is one of the activities of the Program to Enhance Capacity on Social Accountability (PECSA). PECSA is part of the Demand for Good Governance Project (DFGG) now under preparation, which will be supported by the World Bank. The World Bank Newsletter had an opportunity to interview Bhuvan Bhatnagar, DFGG’s Task Team Leader.
Q. Could you tell us about the DFGG project?
A. The Demand for Good Governance (DFGG) Project is expected to be a four year $20 million IDA grant to the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) which will help strengthen and link the work of state and non-state institutions (like NGOs, grassroots groups, independent media, trade unions, etc) to support transparency and accountability programs in Cambodia.
The project, which has been successfully appraised by a Bank team, will likely start implementation in early 2009. It is arguably the first time that the Bank is supporting such a project in Cambodia, and perhaps elsewhere in the world, so implementation will be extremely challenging. Some things will work as designed, others may not, and the focus will be on learning lessons and improving the design while implementing.
Q. Could you tell us about PECSA?
PECSA is an ongoing $2 million Bank executed grant, which is a precursor to the DFGG Project. It prepares non-state actors for a productive engagement in the DFGG Project by building their capacity to support transparency and accountability in the areas of natural resources management, public financial management, decentralization and private sector development.
It provides funds and other capacity building support for training, coaching, mentoring, learning by doing and observing, networking, and monitoring and evaluation.
Q. What is the Social Accountability School?
The Social Accountability School (SAS) is a three-week course on the basic concepts and tools on social accountability, which was organized in Phnom Penh in March-April, 2008. The first week was an orientation course – on the “what, why and how of Social Accountability” – like a basic 101 course in a university.
Weeks 2 and 3 were more intensive skills-building modules which were based on Cambodian as well as broader Asian experience on Social Accountability. These were delivered in a participatory and interactive manner, with discussions, videos, and even role plays, interspersed with lectures and reading materials.
The SAS was designed by two of the leading capacity-building institutions in the Asian region with hands-on experience in social accountability: the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) from India, and the Ateneo School of Government (ASoG) from the Philippines. They are working in partnership with a Cambodian capacity-building institute, SILKA.
Q. Why is it important for Cambodia?
It is important for Cambodia because it will enhance the capacity of non-state actors to constructively engage with the government in support of better development outcomes and improving governance. The RGC itself recognizes that it cannot meet these twin challenges of better development and improved governance by itself: it has committed to do so, in partnership with civil society, with grassroots groups, with independent media and other actors. This is the reason that government staff actively participated with civil society colleagues during the three weeks of the SAS.
Q. Who were selected to be part of this school? And how?
224 candidates from civil society and 33 from government applied to attend the SAS based on a nation-wide open invitation; and eventually 60 were selected from civil society and 21 from government.
From civil society, about 40 percent of the “students” came from the provinces and the rest from Phnom Penh. All of the civil society participants were senior staff of their organizations. The government staff were mainly, but not exclusively, from the key DFGG Project state institutions, namely the Ministry of Interior (MOI), Ministry of National Assembly and Senate Relations and Inspection (MONASRI), and (Radio National of Kampuchea) RNK.
Q. From your own experience, how has civil society made important contributions to improving governance by using social accountability tools?
Based on the Bank’s global experience, civil society has made important contributions to improving governance by using social accountability tools in three ways:
First, by complementing the work of government. For example, government staff in national or provincial social sector departments would hardly ever know precisely, in remote areas, where the poor live, whether health workers or teachers are turning up for work and how they are behaving with clients; and whether textbooks or medicines are being delivered on time and in promised quantities.
Here civil society actors, like NGOs, parent teacher associations, and local health committees, can play an important role by providing bottom-up information and critical feedback on service delivery to government staff, thus complementing their work.
Second, by providing a corrective to the work of government. Sometimes, government services get delivered as monopolies, without the pressure of competition to improve performance. So social accountability tools like report cards can be an important corrective in this setting by providing citizens a voice to enhance government performance, like in India and the Philippines.
Third, by providing a countervailing force so that the government conducts its business with high standards of integrity and anti-corruption through tools like public-expenditure surveys, procurement watch, investigative journalism, and name and-shame campaigns.
In summary, social accountability practitioners can choose from a menu of tools and techniques, depending on whether the objective is to complement, correct, or to provide a countervailing pressure. In Cambodia, based on the local context, the initial emphasis of the Bank, through the DFGG Project, the PECSA, and the Social Accountability Schools, is to build the capacity of civil society for complementary approaches to improve governance.
Q. Most of the SAS presenters are from India or the Philippines. Why has the Bank chosen to draw in specialists from these countries?
These two countries (India and Philippines) have a long and rich experience of social accountability practices and practitioners from which Cambodia can benefit. It was also thought that Asian experience would be more easily understood and adapted in the Cambodian context.
Q. After the SAS school finishes, will the Bank be able to help those trainers put into practice the new skills they have learned?
The SAS is just the beginning of the capacity building, not the end. This will be followed up by distance learning, ongoing mentoring and focused coaching for selected participants in social accountability approaches by experts from India and the Philippines. It will also by complemented by learning trips outside Cambodia to observe first-hand how practitioners in other countries are designing and implementing these approaches.
There will be funds provided for action learning, both in the DFGG Project and PECSA, so Cambodian practitioners can apply what they learn on the ground, and learn from this experience. Finally, provincial and national networks of social accountability practitioners will be strengthened in Cambodia so they can benefit from each other’s growing experience.
(Source: The World Bank Newsletter, Volume 6, Number 5, May 2008)