DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE FOR SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY THE NEW CHALLENGES FOR ASSESSING GOVERNANCE
HOW APPROACHING GOVERNANCE ASSESSMENT HAS CHANGED • (1) from technical to political aspects, • (2) from global to country level, • (3) from numerical indicators to narrative trajectories, • (4) from quantitative to qualitative methods, • (5) from top-down to bottom-up approaches, • (6) from supply to demand side response
THE NEW EMERGING PRINCIPLES • National ownership • Participation by citizen groups and civil society • Multi-stakeholder involvement in design and initiation • Strengthening accountability at all levels • Building local capacity for country assessment • Generating evidence and knowledge that is locally actionable
THE IDEA OF SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY • SA = citizens acting together to hold the state accountable • SA is more than governance assessments based on indicators and involves using data for advocacy and dialogue • SA strengthens demand side through hearings and other measures involving citizens • SA has implications for how to promote democratic governance and do assessments thereof
TOWARD A THIRD GENERATION OF GOVERNANCE ASSESSMENTS • Multiple stakeholder ventures, sometimes initiated by responsive governments, other times by citizen groups; • Exercises that aim at involving stakeholders in practical learning of how to govern better; • Involvement with the objective of making the state more responsive to citizen demands; • Focus on citizen monitoring to strengthen democratic governance; • Linking knowledge generation to local civic action; • Giving as much attention to the legitimacy of policy action as its effectiveness; • Prioritizing a rights-based approach over one focused exclusively on results; • Transcending a narrow institutional emphasis by including political economy analysis
WHAT CAN UNDP DO? • Build genuine citizen demand for democratic governance; • • • • •
Learn from civil society actors and activists; Involve more practitioners from the South; Encourage exchanges of knowledge, methods, and tools; Improve its own political analysis of governance assessments; Create more “mediating spaces” between different stakeholders; • Continue strengthening its virtual resource centre for governance assessments (GAP).