How can citizens exercise their right to participate meaningfully in ensuring basic service delivery? How can the public sector’s willingness and ability to respond and deliver those services in an accountable and sustainable way be increased? This report synthesises the proceedings of a seminar held by One World Action to discuss these two issues. It suggests how politics could be made more democratic with the goal of improving local service delivery.
Access to basic services is considered a human right and ensuring they are available to all citizens is a core function of government. However, many people – usually the poorest – still do not enjoy this right or the political influence needed to secure it. Increasing the people’s influence over governments requires a rethink of the way citizens’ voices are expressed and represented in the political process, as well as new forms of participation and citizenship. To this end, citizens must engage actively with governments by increasing their representation and holding elected officials to account. In addition, administrative structures and procedures, laws and political processes need to be changed to make governments more responsive and accountable. The third key element is to revitalise democracy by building new relationships between ordinary people and government institutions.
There are considerable obstacles to increasing citizen influence, including low awareness of rights and resistance from government. However, innovative methods can be used that go beyond consulting citizens and involve their collaboration in decision making. For participation to be meaningful, five conditions must be met:
- Legal standing or formal recognition for non-governmental representatives in policy-making institutions, including those that organise service delivery.
- An ongoing presence for representatives throughout the institutions’ work process.
- Access by representatives and the public to official information on intentions, progress and performance.
- The right of representatives to issue critical reports to an authority such as the legislature, to challenge poor performance or corruption.
- The right of citizens to demand formal investigations and seek legal redress in the case of unsatisfactory service delivery or corruption.
It is necessary to move beyond ‘civil society’ or ‘state-centred’ approaches to a more holistic focus on the interaction between the two sides. Participatory initiatives must be implemented and expanded in order to transform the relationships between people, governments and external development agencies. Seven key areas of action are identified to strengthen democratic politics:
- Governmental arrangements. There is no optimal model to ensure high-quality service delivery, but responsibility should be decentralised to the level appropriate for each service.
- Political arrangements. Electoral and executive arrangements should be made more accountable.
- Government functions. Citizens and their organisations need to participate more directly in functions relevant to service delivery: planning, budgeting, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.
- The legal framework for governance. Rights must be backed up by strong legislation, and governmental and political arrangements anchored on a sound legal basis.
- Auditing and accountability. Checks on spending are needed to improve resource use. Donors should help civil society build technical capacity.
- Building awareness and capacity. This involves raising citizens’ awareness to allow them to exercise their rights and responsibilities, and building government capacity to be more responsive and accountable.
- Strategies for increasing impact. This requires spreading, scaling up and institutionalising models for civic engagement in democratic politics.
