Citizen engagement and service delivery

The past two years have also seen a renewed focus on anticorruption efforts. Important institutions in this regard include the investigative agencies, the Director of Public Prosecution, and the judiciary. In addition, the judiciary has also played a role in reaffirming the Bill of Rights—for example, landmark decisions reversing various processes or documents that had not had sufficient public participation. The judiciary has protected devolution and adjudicated many intergovernmental disputes.

There has, however, been less progress on citizen engagement in relation to service delivery performance, and citizen engagement is often fragmented. The lack of accessible and timely information on service delivery performance is particularly notable. Citizens lack basic information on how their counties perform on key service delivery outcomes because the data is unavailable—and when it is available, it is often overly technical and fragmented. Similarly, citizens have few opportunities to participate in monitoring service delivery performance except for some small community scorecards and social audit pilots as well as pilots that encourage decentralization within counties by directly involving citizens in service delivery provision and oversight.

The experience is mixed as to whether the new accountability systems are creating incentives for improving service delivery. At the national level, devolution has arguably contributed to a more inclusive political settlement and helped reduce the stakes of the “winner takes all” politics that was a feature of the previous highly centralized state. There is also some evidence to suggest that the service delivery track record of governors may have contributed to citizens voting out about half of the pioneer governors in the first elections. But elections alone may be insufficient to orient governors and the county executives to improve services for citizens. More direct forms of accountability are not yet effective because of information and capacity constraints. Furthermore, in some counties, devolution could have exacerbated feelings of local-level exclusion among county minorities. There is also the risk that devolution may disproportionately benefit local elites at the expense of less powerful or marginalized groups.

Making devolution work for service delivery requires that all levels of government make a renewed effort to implement the next generation of citizen engagement initiatives—focused on holding counties to account for improving service delivery performances, not just for following rules and making investments. As detailed below, this will require information on outcomes, not just inputs; mechanisms that go beyond consultations on plans and budgets; and tools and increasing capacity that enable citizens to monitor service delivery outcomes. This will require an integrated approach.

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT AND SERVICE DELIVERY

As noted in this report’s analytical framework (see chapter 1), there are three requirements to maximizing the impact of devolution on service delivery and preventing accountability failures that would undermine devolution’s promise to improve service delivery: transparency, participation, and accountability, as follows (World Bank 2012, 163):

• The first element relates to information transparency. To participate in decision-making and hold counties and service providers to account, citizens need reliable information about government programs, rules and standards,