With increasing urbanisation and growing infrastructure development, municipalities in Bangladesh now handle much of the public procurement, also known as Municipal Public Procurement (MPP). Bulks of MPP are public works that involve considerable investment and a large number of beneficiaries. Hence, the risk of corruption and irregularities in MPP is immense. We argue that the practice of citizen engagement in MPP can increase transparency and accountability.
Researchers: Kazi Nurmohammad Hossainul Haque
Timeline: 2013
Status: Completed
Contact: Dr Miraza Hassan; mirzahassan@bracu.ac.bd
Publications:
Context
Public procurement is a “critical economic activity of government” that affects all aspects of people’s lives and assumes a large share of government budgets. In Bangladesh, public procurement is estimated to account for about 30% of the country’s total gross domestic product (GDP). With such a large amount of money involved, the sector is highly vulnerable to corruption. As Bangladesh is going through rapid urbanisation, the demand for public procurement in urban areas is also increasing. Municipalities handle this demand for public procurement using public funds. But ensuring transparency in the process is becoming a major challenge. To make the public procurement (including procurement works that are handled by municipalities, i.e. MPP) transparent and impartial, the government introduced the Public Procurement Act (PPA) in 2006 and Public Procurement Rules (PPR) in 2008, both of which came into effect in 2008. But not much improvement has been noticed since. Introducing citizen engagement in MPP might be a better and more effective solution in this regard.
Objectives
Our objective was to explore the possibilities of citizen engagement in public procurement with a special focus on MPP.
This study is relevant to SDG 16 (Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions), particularly to promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.
Findings and Recommendations
There is certainly scope for citizen engagement as an instrument of increasing transparency and accountability in MPP, but certain conditions need to be met first to enable it. The first condition of citizen engagement in public procurement is that citizens have to be common people who are neither part of nor linked to the bidder community and procuring entities (PEs). The second condition for the citizens is to have a stake in the concerned public procurement as direct beneficiaries. And finally, citizens need to be informed and well educated. Since public procurement involves complex multi-staged processes with numerous documents, a reasonable level of education, awareness, and integrity are needed for citizens to understand how public procurement works and is relevant to them.
We think that in the long run, there have to be legal reforms and policy innovations through some amendments in PPA and PPR to allow citizens’ inclusion in the procurement process. In the short run, citizens should observe if the bidding process is complying with related PPR provisions and whether quality standards are met. The citizens can seek necessary information by making information requests to PEs, and then disseminate the knowledge to create citizen engagement in MPP through public awareness-raising.
