Month: October 2021

Nicola Nixon, Stefaan Verhulst, Imran Matin & Philips J. Vermonte explore a really interesting initiative to crowdsource the most important current issues on the governance agenda.

Photo: Asia Foundation

Late last year, we – the Governance Lab at NYU, the CSIS Indonesia, the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, Bangladesh and The Asia Foundation – joined forces across New York, Jakarta, Dhaka, Hanoi, and San Francisco to launch the 100 Governance Questions Initiative. This is the latest iteration of the GovLab’s broader initiative to map questions across several domains.

We live in an era marked by an unprecedented amount of data. Anyone who uses a mobile phone or accesses the internet is generating vast streams of information. Covid-19 has only intensified this phenomenon.

Although this data contains tremendous potential for positive social transformation, much of that potential goes unfulfilled. In the development context, one chief problem is that data initiatives are often driven by supply (i.e., what data or data solutions are available?) rather than demand (what problems actually need solutions?). Too many projects begin with the database, the app, the dashboard–beholden to the seduction of technology– and now, many parts of the developing world are graveyards of tech pilots. As is well established in development theory but not yet fully in practice, solution-driven governance interventions are destined to fail.

The 100 Questions Initiative, pioneered by the GovLab, seeks to overcome the chasm between supply and demand. It begins not by searching for what data is available, but by asking important questions about the biggest challenges societies and countries face, and then seeking more targeted and relevant data solutions. In doing this, it narrows the gap between policy makers and constituents, providing opportunities for improved evidence-based policy and community engagement in developing countries. As part of this initiative, we seek to define the ten most important questions across several domains, including Migration, Gender, Employment, the Future of Work, and—now–Governance.

On this occasion, we invited over 100 experts and practitioners in governance and data science –whom we call “bilinguals”– from various organizations, companies, and government agencies to identify what they see as the most pressing governance questions in their respective domains. Over 100 bilinguals were encouraged to prioritize potential impact, novelty, and feasibility in their questioning — moving toward a roadmap for data-driven action and collaboration that is both actionable and ambitious.

By June, the bilinguals had articulated 170 governance-related questions. Over the next couple of months, these were sorted, discussed and refined during two rounds of collaboration with the bilinguals; first to narrow down to the top 40 and then to the top 10. Bilinguals were asked what, to them, are the most significant governance questions we must answer with data today? The result is the following 10 questions:

1. What is the relationship between transparency of government performance and public trust in government institutions? Which factors have the most significant impact on increasing public trust in government?
2. Which populations/groups are and are not represented in data that is collected and used for formal government decision-making? Who is most at risk of being excluded from consideration or inclusion with the rise in data innovations?
3. If citizens have greater access to data and information, does that mobilize them to take action and engage politically? Under what circumstances does that happen?
4. How are social media and digital communications platforms affecting the way people engage politically and the nature and quality of political debate?
5. What are the key factors contributing to effective civic engagement at national and local levels? Which skills or incentives do citizens need to participate in public decision-making?
6. Does open governance affect the accountability of those in power; facilitate public debate and participation; and lead to more inclusive, transparent and timely decision-making?
7. How can democracies achieve inclusion more effectively, in terms of both process (i.e., how decisions are made, whose voices count), and outcomes (i.e., how resources, prosperity and well-being are distributed)?
8. How does the level of community monitoring/ transparency of government budget and expenditure at different administrative levels affect the quality of public service delivery?
9. Which factors play the biggest role in determining differences in institutional capacity and performance of government agencies?
10. How has democratic regression (i.e., erosion of democratic norms and standards) affected public service delivery? Does less democratic governance lead to less effective service delivery?

The public vote and accompanying webinar events will give us a chance to discuss and debate the salience and answerability of these questions with a broad audience. Through this exercise, together with our bilingual collaborators, we aim to identify interests and build collaborative future efforts to find and use the data that can answer some of these questions.

The governance challenges of our present era, perhaps especially those posed by a globally dispersed pandemic, require multisectoral and geographically diverse collaboration. It is our hope that this collaborative will pool data and expertise across sectors and regions to generate new insights and public sector innovations to strengthen and improve the quality of governance.

Join us and have your say on which of these represents the most pressing governance question right now. These questions are just what the bilinguals say; now we want to test them with a much broader audience. Click on the link below and have your say.

Dr Nicola Nixon is The Asia Foundation’s Director of Governance; Stefaan G. Verhulst is Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer of the Governance Laboratory (The GovLab) at New York University (NYU); Dr Imran Matin is the Executive Director at BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), BRAC University; and Philips J. Vermonte is the Executive Director of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies Centre for Strategic and International Studies. 

The blog was originally posted in From Poverty to Power.

Meeting with Polli Samaj by UN Women/Snigdha Zaman, made available by CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The global economy loses USD 2.6 trillion to corruption each year, while developing country economies lose USD 1.26 trillion annually to corruption, tax evasion and illicit financial flow. These statistics indicate the need for ensuring social accountability across the globe—especially in developing economies—to combat corruption in the public sector.

In theory, social accountability interventions can ensure government’s accountability to citizens through an array of mechanisms that promote good governance. However, how can we pinpoint which social accountability interventions can effectively curb corruption? Which interventions are already implemented, and in which regions? What do we know from existing evidence?

Practitioners and policymakers first need to know and access research that already exists on the impact of various social accountability interventions before considering new ones. An Evidence and Gap Map (EGM) helps make these interventions more accessible. With that in mind, BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), in collaboration with Campbell Collaboration, has been developing an EGM on social accountability interventions in low and middle-income countries.

Social accountability interventions, in general, focus on civic engagement to ensure citizen participation in policy processes, responsive services, and transparency. With the growing need for good governance, the necessity of social accountability is thus imperative to improving the public sector. The interventions are tried and tested in different sectors of the society, such as health, education and public services. The evidence base of these interventions is still expanding, and therefore a map of existing evidence is much needed to make them more accessible. Researchers and policymakers, especially of the low and middle-income countries, can access the relevant impact evaluations easily to identify which interventions have already been tested, while a systematic review of social accountability interventions can reveal which of these interventions work best. With the help of the EPPI reviewer, more than 5000 studies were screened, and 53 studies were included at the final stage.

This evidence and gap map visualizes 44 impact evaluations and 9 systematic reviews. The intervention and outcome categories are kept broad to cover all the possible social accountability interventions from different sectors. During the framework development, the team consulted with experts and stakeholders to make sure the framework had a wide scope. It was a difficult and lengthy process to reach a consensus as the concept of social accountability is evolving.

The final map shows that the most common intervention is a community scorecard, a social audit or a citizens’ report card; about 57% of studies have worked with this intervention. Least experimented interventions are social mobilization campaigns, participatory budget analysis and public expenditure tracking surveys.

Half of the experimental studies (51%) most commonly reported efficient service delivery as output, while 40% reported service utilization as output. The least reported outcomes are economic empowerment, budget utilization, policy influence and changes, and answerability.

Lower middle-income countries have the most experimental studies along with systematic reviews (58%), while upper middle-income countries have the least studies (26%). Respectively, 25% and 23% of studies are about women and children, whereas only 1% are about indigenous people and 2% are about people with mental illness and disability.

This map shows that widely implemented interventions are limited in nature. We see that there are not many experimental studies on critical interventions such as grievance redressal mechanism, co-governance, and participatory budget analysis. Policymakers and practitioners can consider designing experiments on these interventions. Additionally, countries from upper middle-income groups can focus more on the experimental studies in their income region.

The purpose of EGMs is to visualize and categorize the existence of an evidence base so that the conversation surrounding what exists and what is further needed can be easier for the practitioners. Despite the challenges the team encountered while developing the framework of the map, the scope of this map is significant as it has encompassed almost all relevant categories of interventions. The full report on this EGM will help the policymakers in discussing social accountability interventions. The gaps that this map has identified can be a starting point for discussing what evidence needs to be studied further and which locations are deprived of the interventions.

Iffat Zahan is a Research Associate in the Research Policy and Governance (RPG) team at the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD).