Comments on: How can South Africa promote citizenship and accountability? A conversation with some state planners

By: Søren

Søren — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:27:37 +0000

Bob, I doubt that the authors, Mansuri and Rao, were really that surprised. They wrote what is basically the same report just in form of a working paper back in 2004. (and actually in 2003)

Community-Based and –
Driven Development: A Critical Review,” World Bank Policy Research Paper
3209

By: Pete

Pete — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:10:38 +0000

In your post of global gender norms you state that women remain in time poverty because they use their spare time to shift to different activities (my words, not yours). In the UK women are the active citizens most often involved in the schools and this can be seen in the playgrounds at the end of the day and the lists of people involved in the PTA (parent teacher association). Presumably this relates to the poverty of a community; once there is ‘enough’ money it is usually women who decide to spend less time earning and will use some of this time to play a part in the education system.

So to increase involvement with schools first end poverty….

By: Bob Kaplan

Bob Kaplan — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:31:02 +0000

Nice to see more discussion of citizens’ agency lately. An unfortunate side-effect of all the big donors jumping on the participation bandwagon over the last two decades is that they have turned it into just another technocratic input. A recent WB report talks about the disappointing results of “induced participation.” What’s surprising is that the authors seemed surprised. How much progress should we expect in moving from dependency to agency if development is just a technocratic exercise of procuring goods and expert services to achieve desired results? And guess who gets to choose the desired results?!

By: Charles Abani

Charles Abani — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:35:53 +0000

Great stuff Duncan. We are working on a project at local level in Nigeria that is bringing together both demand and supply interventions to tackle specific service delivery and accountability issues. Our theory of change is that ‘convergence’ is both the process we are using and the outcome we are seeking.

One of the other things we are keen to do is innovate – move away from the dogma of ‘how’ services are delivered and who delivers them. Building on some of the work out there (and I confess from this blog too!!), we have coined the term ‘better-fit’ approaches to services and accountability – combing scalable ideas with contextual reality…

The rubber hits the road shortly …then we’ll know if its just more talk…