Publication: Citizens as Drivers of Change: How Citizens Practice Human Rights to Engage with the State and Promote Transparency and Accountability
Date
2017-07
ISSN
Published
2017-07
Author(s)
World Bank Group
Abstract
Since 2014, the World Bank Group
(WBG) has formally mainstreamed citizen engagement in its
strategy to end extreme poverty and share prosperity,
building on 25 years of emerging practice and research. In
the early 2000s, the WBG issued guidance on multi
stakeholder engagement to strengthen accountability
relationships through citizen participation and ensure that
the benefits of development projects reached the poor. Most
recently, the development community has acknowledged that
development outcomes improve when citizens participate in
development, leading to the WBG mandate to mainstream
citizen engagement across sectors and countries. The
research described in this report, made possible through the
Nordic trust fund (NTF), a multi donor knowledge and
learning program on human rights for WB staff, aims to
deepen understanding of citizen engagement in the
development arena through in-depth study of three grassroots
initiatives in which empowered citizens played a central
role. The research complements existing approaches by
explicitly adopting a human rights perspective as well as
focusing on organic citizen-led initiatives rather than WBG-
or client-initiated projects. In analyzing these cases, this
report applies the framework of the World Development Report
2017 (WDR 2017): governance and the law to understand how
citizens effectively disrupted the persistent power
asymmetries that undermined development outcomes. This
report analyzes citizen engagement to reduce corruption in
service delivery in three diverse settings: in Afghanistan,
improving education outcomes through community-based
monitoring of schools; in Paraguay, monitoring sovereign
wealth fund resources allocated to education to improve the
infrastructure of marginalized schools; and in Serbia,
promoting transparency and the integrity of physicians to
reduce corruption in the health sector.
Citation
“World Bank Group. 2017. Citizens as Drivers of Change; Citizens as Drivers of Change : How Citizens Practice Human Rights to Engage with the State and Promote Transparency and Accountability. © Washington, DC: World Bank. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/27653 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”