The government of Bangladesh implemented the Public Procurement Reform Project (PPRP) II with financial assistance from the World Bank. BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), BRAC University supported the government with project design, field management and research. One of the main focuses of this project was to engage citizens in monitoring public procurement. With this target, BIGD has designed a citizen engagement strategy that included the establishment of a citizen committee complemented by local community mobilization surrounding project sites. An elite centred citizen committee strategy needed to be rethought to address the project’s incentive problems and financial sustainability. Site Specific Community Mobilization was implemented as a minimalist strategy with only two actors: engineers and local citizens, who live adjacent to the site of the projects. Citizen-monitors who live adjacent to the sites tend to have different incentive structures, which enables a relatively robust form of collective action. The new intervention strategy could tactically avoid the larger factors such as social capital or elite political influence, which tend to make project design messy or vulnerable to political economy constraints. The new strategy would not incur any project costs since there would be no NGOs to facilitate, no offsite citizen groups, which needs to be trained or nurtured.
Authors: Hassan, Mirza M.; Aziz, Syeda Salina; Zillur, Kaneta
Type: Policy brief
Year: 2017
