Citizen participation sounds like a positive thing, but when
applied to international development programs, it is difficult and frequently
ineffective. Few people would claim that
we should oppose citizen participation. On
the other hand, many people, especially technocrats, doubt its effectiveness in
private conversations. As one high-level
government official put it once, “Why should we turn the government over to a
goat herder?” In other words, these are
nice ideas, but are they practical?
Answering this question is difficult, because the term
citizen participation is mixed in a jargon stew along with many other
terms. These include social
accountability, empowerment, inclusion, bottom up development, participatory
development, feedback loops, consultation and others. As may be expected, development practitioners
often put these into a black box, then concoct opinions based on just a couple
of examples.
In this post, I outline some simple characteristics of
citizen participation processes to allow observers to evaluate them. My main argument is that, given the diversity
of participatory mediums, any analysis of citizen participation should attempt
to distinguish the form of participation.
Citizen participation is practiced in many ways in development, and too
often, development officials form an opinion without a closer look at what they
are talking about. Citizens can simply share ideas in a meeting, execute
monitoring of a project, provide feedback on performance, vote in elections for
committees, etc. To distinguish these
forms, and give substance to an analysis of citizen participation, the three most
critical questions are: What specific decisions are citizens involved in? What substantive decision-making power do
they yield, and if not much, will the official with such power act based on the
information provided by citizens? And what
is the quality of participation?
To illustrate this, I would like to take an example of
consultations, the most common form of direct citizen participation in
development. This is the case in government projects such as some forms of Community
Driven Development, or common NGO projects that involve building
infrastructure; it is also mostly applicable to school management committees
and health committees, or social accountability initiatives such as citizen
report cards.
The first question is, what specific decisions are citizens
involved in? In general, these
consultations aim to reveal information on preferences (though there are side
benefits such as generating community buy in).
Consultations are particularly important in cases where citizens have
distinct and unpredictable needs that may be met by a development project. The choices as to which interventions are
possible are generally set by the funding organization – i.e. the government or
NGO, which greatly limits the outcomes of the process. Moreover, choices are limited informally, as participants
understandably perceive certain choices as more likely to ‘fit’ in the
organization’s plans, and thus lead to funding and execution.
As relates to substantive decision-making, citizens’ power
is usually quite limited in consultations, along with most participatory forums. The implementing organizations take
consultations as a form of advice, and can easily ignore the suggestions made
by participants. Organizations sometimes
spend time and resources on these meetings, only so that decision makers completely
ignore them, which is obviously disconcerting for participants. In such cases, it is important to determine
whether the decision-makers actually want to listen to people. If not, then the process is mostly pointless.
The third area relates more to the quality of the process. Just
as elections can be free and fair, or full of ballot box stuffing, participatory
processes vary in their quality. The
list of potential determinants of quality is long, but the main concerns are
focusing the meeting (and avoiding a long wish list at the end), ensuring
inclusiveness if different members of the community have different needs, and
providing the requisite background information so people can participate
effectively. Most concerning, informal
power relations can undermine the inclusiveness of the process, leading to
capture from narrow interests.
Hopefully, in the future, analyses of citizen participation
in development will sharpen their focus along these three lines, instead of
trying to make broad generalizations about participation in all its forms.
