This blog post briefs the findings of the research I conducted for my master's thesis. My research aimed to understand what factors affect citizen participation in social accountability for improving public services—specifically World Vision's Citizen Voice and Action—during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Citizen participation is crucial to social accountability and community-based monitoring (CBM). These interventions can only be effective if citizens participate in feedback, learning, and exacting accountability; thus, it is essential to identify and understand the factors for their participation. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic brought new challenges to citizen engagement, as new health protocols prevent big community gatherings and impose other restrictions.
I conducted a comparative case study to compare the experience of World Vision field offices in Bangladesh and Cambodia. In each country, my study covers three rural areas where there are CVA implementations focused on improving primary healthcare services and operated before and during the pandemic. Factors affecting citizen participation in CBM (gathered from existing literature) inform the design of the study’s data collection forms and key informant interviews, which are then used to gather data from WV staff and community members, respectively. These factors include information gaps, inattention, elite capture, free-riding, perceived political efficacy, incentives, inequality and discrimination, high opportunity cost, safety and security concerns, location or accessibility, and salience of the issue. I processed and compared data to find similarities and differences between the two countries and to see if the factors affect citizens based on sex and age group.
Findings show that there are seven factors that affect participation in both countries (information gaps, perceived political efficacy, high opportunity cost, incentives, free-riding, safety concerns, and salience of the service and issue). While similar in this respect, there are differences between the two countries in terms of to which citizens (based on sex and age group) each factor is relevant.
Recommendations for CVA implementers include improvements in information dissemination strategies, gathering feedback on capacity-building activities for citizens, and ensuring representation of women and children. Further research is also recommended to achieve a better understanding of the factors and to compare across with CVA implementations focused on different types of public services. For the ones willing to find more details about this research, please, check here my Member of the Month presentation, where it is also possible to find the entire study.
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