6.1 Elements of social accountability systems

finances, and decision-making. They also need this information in formats that are accessible, timely, and relevant to citizens’ needs and priorities. • The second element relates to citizen participation in decision-making and service delivery oversight. Citizens need opportunities to participate in decision-making, articulate their needs and priorities, and provide feedback on service delivery outputs and quality. • The third element relates to accountability. Ultimately county governments and frontline service providers will respond to citizen priorities and feedback if citizens have meaningful opportunities to hold them to account for their decisions and actions, as well as for their lack of action.

These three core elements underpin a virtuous cycle of strengthened citizen engagement and improved service delivery (figure 6.1).

Transparency. Transparent information across the full cycle of planning, budgeting, and implementation, as well as basic information about citizen rights and service delivery standards, is critical to meaningful and effective citizen engagement. This includes information about government plans, budget allocation, fiscal transfers, and service rules and standards, as well as comparative service access and quality metrics.

Transparency and the requirement to regularly publish information on government programs, finances, and performance is usually mandated in legal provisions (such as public financial management [PFM] laws) and in sectoral legislation (such as the Water Act or local government regulations). However, rules and regulations about information transparency are rarely sufficient in themselves in ensuring that citizens have adequate access to information about service delivery. National and local governments also require systems and the technical capacity to systematically collect and distribute this information in formats that are accessible, comprehensible, and timely.

It is often also critical to incentivize compliance by linking the collection and publication of information to fiscal transfers and the annual budget cycle. Civil society and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—such as think tanks, the media, and academia—often play important intermediary roles in analyzing and presenting data in forms that are relevant and salient to ordinary citizens.

FIGURE 6.1

Elements of social accountability systems

Government

Transparency: information for citizens Accountability Participation and feedback: information from citizens

Citizens

Participation. Although many participatory mechanisms span the full gamut of service delivery, from policy to outcomes, fundamentally they exist to provide an opportunity for citizens to express their needs, priorities, and preferences regarding government and service provider decisions and actions. Participatory mechanisms tend to focus on four stages in the service delivery cycle:

1. The first type of mechanism focuses on policy and project designs in which the objective is to seek citizen feedback and preferences regarding service delivery procedures and standards, project designs, and implementation arrangements, as well as broader development strategies. This mechanism includes public hearings, community consultations, and focus group discussions, as well as written and electronic consultations.

2. The second type of mechanism focuses on planning and budgeting, seeking citizen inputs on service delivery priorities and needs. This includes participatory planning, participatory budgeting, and rapid rural appraisal (RRA) methods as well as citizen committees or juries.

3. The third type of participatory mechanism focuses on implementation and the service delivery itself, including community implementation committees, integrity pacts or committees, and different types of user groups such as parent associations.

4. The fourth type of participatory mechanism focuses on service delivery outcomes, including whether a service delivery facility is operating, or the quality of the services themselves, such as complaint-handling systems, customer-satisfaction surveys, and community scorecards and social audits.

To be effective and fair, all these participatory mechanisms must be inclusive and open to the public, especially to poor and marginalized groups; relevant to citizen needs; and timely.1

Accountability. Devolution fundamentally changes the accountability relationships between the different actors and levels of government. Holding government to account for improving service delivery once required citizens to appeal to the national government, often via either members of parliament (MPs) or directly to the president and his entourage (figure 6.2, panel a). The need for citizens to aggregate their grievances and priorities in ways that would capture the attention of these national-level actors invariably required citizens to frame their grievances in local terms or to the use clientelist networks to resolve their complaints (EACC 2013).

There were also sector-level grievance mechanisms. For example, within the water sector before devolution, the Majivoice grievance redress mechanism was implemented by Athi Water Services and Nairobi Water Company. A framework also exists for complaint handling by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) (CAJ 2014).

Devolution (and the constitutional reforms more generally) fundamentally changed the accountability structure for service delivery for most services (figure 6.2, panel b). The new devolved governance arrangements effectively shortened the route for accountability and created multiple new formal and informal mechanisms for holding county governments and local service providers to account for service delivery.

The new devolved governance arrangements strengthened upward accountability, created new forms of horizontal accountability, reinvigorated diagonal