Civic Participation and Accountability (GH0026)

What is the public problem that the commitment will address?: As part of efforts to strengthen citizen’s engagement at the sub-national level, a framework on participatory planning and budgeting has been developed by the Local Government Service (LGS) to guide Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in citizens’ engagement. The new Local Governance Act (Act 936) passed by Parliament in 2016 dedicates a whole section to popular participation. The Inter-Ministerial Coordinating Committee on Local Government have consequently developed a manual and an action plan to guide its implementation. In 2013, the Government of Ghana through the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development (MLGRD) commenced implementation of the Local Government Capacity Support Project (LGCSP) in some 46 selected Metropolitan and Municipal Assemblies (MMAs). An integral component of this project is the establishment of Social Accountability (SA) units, development and use of public financial management templates by the participating assemblies to improve citizens’ education, communication and engagement. In the second action plan the government proposed to establish Client Service Units (CSU) in all the District Assemblies. This action has been substantially implemented. There is the need to move further the process to promote effective citizens’ participation in decision-making processes.; What is the commitment?: The commitment is to strengthen mechanisms for ensuring that citizens can receive feedback from elected officials (both Members of Parliament and Assembly Members).; How will the commitment contribute to solve the public problem?: The commitment is to expand the civic engagement process through innovative ways to ensure that citizens can receive feedback from elected officials (both Members of Parliament and Assembly Members). In addition, the decentralized institutions at the sub-national level are to be accountable to citizens by annually reporting on budget implementation to include non-financial information.; Why is this commitment relevant to OGP values?: The commitment will help improve opportunities for the public to influence the decisions by the elected officials (both at the local and national levels). It will also help to improve the quality and accessibility of information to the public.

7. Civic Participation and Accountability

Language of the commitment as it appears in the action plan:

‘As part of efforts to strengthen citizen’s engagement at the sub-national level, a framework on participatory planning and budgeting has been developed by the Local Government Service (LGS) to guide Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in citizens’ engagement. The new Local Governance Act (Act 936) passed by Parliament in 2016 dedicates a whole section to popular participation. The Inter-Ministerial Coordinating Committee on Local Government has consequently developed a manual and an action plan to guide its implementation.

In 2013, the Government of Ghana through the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development (MLGRD) commenced implementation of the Local Government Capacity Support Project (LGCSP) in some 46 selected Metropolitan and Municipal Assemblies (MMAs). An integral component of this project is the establishment of Social Accountability (SA) units, development and use of public financial management templates by the participating assemblies to improve citizens’ education, communication and engagement.

In the second action plan the government proposed to establish Client Service Units (CSU) in all the District Assemblies. This action has been substantially implemented. The government is committed to move this process further to promote effective citizens’ participation in decision-making processes. The government is committed to strengthening mechanisms for ensuring that citizens can receive feedback from elected officials (both Members of Parliament and Assembly Members). This can be accomplished through innovative ways that ensure citizens’ engagement and open civic space. The decentralized institutions at the sub-national level are to be accountable to citizens by annually reporting on budget implementation to include non-financial information.’

Milestones/Activities:

• MLGRD through the Local Government Service (LGS) to expand the establishment of SA units in all the 216 MMDAs (46 Metropolitan and Municipals already have accountability units and Focal Persons) by December 2018;
• MLGRD through the Local Government Service (LGS) to integrate and strengthen the CSUs and SA desks in line with the social accountability role of MMDAs by August 2019;
• MLGRD and LGS to monitor the implementation of the popular participation (civic participation) framework by March 2019;
• MLGRD and Office of the Head of Local Government Service to ensure all MMDAs adequately support Accountability Units and Client Service Units to obtain feedbacks from citizens by August 2019;
• MoF Fiscal Decentralization Unit (FDU), MLGRD, and LGS to ensure MMDAs comprehensively report on budget implementation (both financial and non-financial information) annually to citizens by March 2019; and,
• Parliament to provide quarterly reports on petitions and feedbacks received from the public by December 2018.’

Start Date: November 2017

End Date: August 2019

Action plan is available in this link

Context and Objectives

This commitment aims to improve civic participation in governance, especially at subnational levels where the state-society nexus has been historically weak. [64] For almost two centuries, governance in Ghana has been centered in the capital city, Accra. Efforts to decentralize have had varying levels of success. [65] Interventions to build districts’ capacities and bring government closer to the people are ongoing but continue to confront low political engagement and technical know-how, politicization, and inadequate resources. For example, a study conducted in nine localities revealed that some Assembly Members were unpaid, affecting their ability to meet with their constituents. Frustration also resulted of the public servants’ incapacity to deliver on citizens’ expectations vis-à-vis the availability of means. [66] Another assessment of local government in one of the country’s Municipal Assemblies found that few opportunities were given to local communities to participate in relevant affairs and, in a few instances, were disregarded. [67] Analysts who monitor decentralization find it hard to access vital information. [68]

The NAP thus includes this commitment to try to improve popular participation and to increase transparency in governance at the district level. Women’s involvement is a notable challenge, especially in cultural contexts like the Northern Region where it is against traditional norms for women to be present in certain spaces and to take part in specific activities. [69]

To promote civic engagement at the local level, this commitment seeks to strengthen mechanisms for ensuring that citizens can receive feedback from elected officials by increasing the number of government agencies (social and civil service units) to collect feedback from citizens by encouraging Parliament to report on petitions and feedback from citizens and by reporting on budget implementation annually. The commitment addresses infrastructure, policy, and processes. This commitment aims to institutionalize civic participation in governance at the local government level by creating designated structures for state-citizen engagement and providing information to inform this relationship. It could help strengthen civic participation at local levels by stimulating citizen feedback and strengthening citizen awareness of the public’s civic rights and of the existence and function of feedback mechanisms.

Through implementing the popular participation framework, Milestone III relates to policy and aims to entrench the norm of citizen involvement in governance. The last three milestones put a priority on the sharing of information and are potentially useful ways to promote greater civic participation in budgetary and governance processes. First, the last three milestones do so by supporting Accountability Units and Client Service Units to obtain feedback from citizens as a means of assessing their own performance. Based on preliminary results of the implementation of the Local Government Capacity Support Project (LGCSP) in partnership with the World Bank, elected members of the Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) are required to address constituents in fora and town halls regarding the execution of projects. [70] Second, the three last milestones ensure that MMDAs report are published comprehensively on budget implementation (both financial and nonfinancial information) annually to citizens. Third, the last milestone requires the Parliament to provide quarterly reports on petitions and feedback received from the public.

This commitment’s milestones are clearly relevant to the OGP value of civic participation, as the commitment seeks to improve the government’s current mechanisms for collecting inputs and feedback from citizens. This commitment is also relevant to the OGP value of access to information in that it seeks to encourage MMDAs and Parliament to provide citizens, via periodic reports, with information on the status of budget implementation and petitions from citizens. While the commitment refers to public accountability, the IRM researcher could not find any information to determine if the necessary redress and corrective mechanisms have been established for cases where public officials do not address citizen’s needs/complaints effectively.

This commitment is for the most part verifiable. Verifiability can be assessed by determining the number of SA units in all the 216 MMDA, by counting the number of reports available to the public on budget implementation and Parliament’s treatment of petitions and feedback. It is worth noting that verifiability for milestones II, III, and IV is somewhat less clear. To sum up, the commitment is verifiable, but it would help to strengthen its impact if proposed milestones were more specific about what they intend to achieve and how. For example, it would be difficult to assess implementation of the activity that tasks the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development to “integrate and strengthen the CSUs and SA desks in line with the social accountability role of MMDAs” because it does not provide indicators with which to measure integration. Additionally, it remains unclear how the implementation of the popular participation framework will be measured.

If implemented as written, this commitment contributes to providing citizens with feedback from elected officials (both Members of Parliament and Assembly Members) although not to a full extent. Therefore, the potential impact of this commitment is minor.

The first two objectives relate to structural changes to the civic participation framework. The first goal is to expand the establishment of SA units in all the 216 MMDAs, and the NAP informs that there are already 46 accountability units and focal persons in MMDAs. According to the findings of survey named “Citizens Perception Survey,” conducted in the 46 MMDAs to gauge citizens’ opinion on the delivery of the LGCSP, there was greater engagement and involvement of MMDAs with local communities than before. [71] Although there is a need for greater subnational state-citizen interaction, creating new structures can be cost-intensive. It may thus be worth considering, as Awal suggested, assigning the social accountability mandate to an existing local government structure based in communities. The second goal within the structure rubric are to integrate and strengthen the CSUs and SA desks in line with the social accountability role of MMDAs. This could help provide some cohesion among the plural social accountability actors at local government levels.

There is a need for an entity to serve as a liaison between local government structures and communities. However, it is debatable whether this necessitates the creation of new, special structures in the form of social accountability units, as there are existing local government structures that can be assigned this responsibility and that would benefit from building their capacities to engage with citizens at that level. Awal Mohammed, social accountability program officer with the Centre for Democratic Development-Ghana told the IRM researcher that in addition to the stated benefits, appointing such an existing unit or/and officer to handle community relations is also a cost-saving mechanism. [72]

However, the slow pace of establishing the social accountability units in 2015–2017 suggests that Ghanaians will have disparate access to their local government structures until all the units are all set up and fully functional. The potential impact of the social accountability units will depend on how well they are implemented, how proactive they are in interacting with communities, and how actively citizens engage them. It will also depend on the mandate and function of the units. As such, the potential impact of the commitment is assessed as minor. As Awal pointed out, low awareness of rights and responsibilities is a factor common to both government and those governed. He also pointed to a culture of deference to older, richer, and more powerful people and an attitude of political resignation as factors that prevent citizens from demanding information from their local government officials.

Next steps

This commitment could include activities aimed at enhancing political will/and engagement from members of the Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs), which is a key ingredient to successful local governance. This commitment should be carried out in subsequent action plans, with improvements in trackability, public accountability, and civic participation.

• Going forward, the NAP could specify, for example, what it means by “adequately support” with regard to milestone IV. Also, with Milestone V, “comprehensively report” is vague and potentially confusing and needs to be spelled out clearly.
• Furthermore, it would be helpful to engage citizen groups in dialogue about the prospects of using coalitions of existing local government structures and civil society groups, instead of social accountability units, to liaise between the government and its people.
• The IRM recommends proposing milestones with more specificity about what they intend to achieve and how.
• The IRM recommends setting numerical and qualitative targets for each milestone about the type and format of data to be shared to facilitate access and comprehension to make goals more actionable.
• It would be important to include a specific requirement or mechanism that makes members of the MMDAs accountable in case they fail to effectively address the needs of their constituents.
• It would also be advisable to include other activities that help citizens make additional decisions once they know the status of their feedback/ facilitating mechanisms that allow them to exert pressure on parliamentary members to address their petitions.
• Several studies and different sources coincide in that effectiveness of public service delivery and engagement of citizens by local servants is crucial. In that regard, ensuring that public officials will deliver on citizen’s needs is important to encourage citizen involvement and participation at the local level.

7. Civic Participation and Accountability

Commitment text: As part of efforts to strengthen citizen’s engagement at the sub-national level, a framework on participatory planning and budgeting has been developed by the Local Government Service (LGS) to guide Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in citizens’ engagement. The new Local Governance Act (Act 936) passed by Parliament in 2016 dedicates a whole section to popular participation. The Inter-Ministerial Coordinating Committee on Local Government has consequently developed a manual and an action plan to guide its implementation.

In 2013, the Government of Ghana through the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development (MLGRD) commenced implementation of the Local Government Capacity Support Project (LGCSP) in some 46 selected Metropolitan and Municipal Assemblies (MMAs). An integral component of this project is the establishment of Social Accountability (SA) units, development and use of public financial management templates by the participating assemblies to improve citizens’ education, communication and engagement.

In the second action plan the government proposed to establish Client Service Units (CSU) in all the District Assemblies. This action has been substantially implemented. The government is committed to move this process further to promote effective citizens’ participation in decision-making processes. The government is committed to strengthening mechanisms for ensuring that citizens can receive feedback from elected officials (both Members of Parliament and Assembly Members). This can be accomplished through innovative ways that ensure citizens’ engagement and open civic space. The decentralized institutions at the sub-national level are to be accountable to citizens by annually reporting on budget implementation to include non-financial information.

Milestones/Activities:

• MLGRD through the Local Government Service (LGS) to expand the establishment of SA units in all the 216 MMDAs (46 Metropolitan and Municipals already have accountability units and Focal Persons) by December 2018;
• MLGRD through the Local Government Service (LGS) to integrate and strengthen the CSUs and SA desks in line with the social accountability role of MMDAs by August 2019;
• MLGRD and LGS to monitor the implementation of the popular participation (civic participation) framework by March 2019;
• MLGRD and Office of the Head of Local Government Service to ensure all MMDAs adequately support Accountability Units and Client Service Units to obtain feedbacks from citizens by August 2019;
• MoF Fiscal Decentralization Unit (FDU), MLGRD, and LGS to ensure MMDAs comprehensively report on budget implementation (both financial and non-financial information) annually to citizens by March 2019; and,
• Parliament to provide quarterly reports on petitions and feedbacks received from the public by December 2018

Editorial Note: For the full text of Ghana's 2017-2019 Action Plan please see: https://www.opengovpartnership.org/documents/ghana-action-plan-2017-2019/

This commitment aimed to improve civic participation in governance, especially at the sub-national level where the state-society nexus has been historically weak. It sought to do this by strengthening formal structures of engagement with local government. ^[70] Governance in Ghana has been centered in the capital city, Accra, for almost two centuries. Previous efforts to decentralize have had varying levels of success, owing to low political engagement between local government officials and their constituents, inadequate technical capacity by the former, politicization of local issues, and inadequate resources. ^[71]

The completion of this commitment was limited at the end of the implementation period. Progress in relation to three of the six activities (II, III, and IV) could not be assessed because they were assessed in Ghana’s 2017−2019 design report as lacking specificity. ^[72] Broadly, these three activities related to integrating and strengthening social accountability structures, ensuring that “all MMDAs adequately support” these structures “to obtain feedbacks from citizens,” and monitoring the implementation of the popular participation (civic participation) framework. ^[73] The IRM researcher found that the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development collaborated with a Ghanaian CSO, CDD-Ghana, to implement a social audit of 20 district assemblies in 2019. ^[74] One section of Parliament’s website is dedicated to guidelines for the public to submit petitions and specifies that reports on petitions will be made available on its website. ^[75] However, the IRM researcher found no petitions or related reports anywhere on the website. Social accountability units that exist are not functional, ^[76] and Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies’ (MMDAs’) budget reporting rates vary according to local government capacities and transparency levels per district. ^[77]

Limited progress in implementing this commitment can be attributed to a number of inhibitory factors. As a civil society representative, Awal Mohammed, pointed out in an interview with the IRM researcher, low awareness of rights and responsibilities is a factor common to both the government and governed. ^[78] He also pointed to a culture of deference to older, richer, and more powerful people, and an attitude of political resignation, as factors that prevent citizens from demanding information from their local government officials. A study by Ghanaian think tank, Imani-Africa, revealed “limitations in accountability and transparency in the management of local expenditure” in 15 MMDAs across Ghana, despite recent reforms. ^[79] The cumulative effect of these factors was that existing practices and cultures of civic participation at local levels did not change enough to fulfil the objectives of this commitment.

This commitment was relevant to three OGP values: access to information, civic participation, and public accountability. The commitment’s implementation did not result in an improvement in access to information as there was no evidence of Parliament publishing reports on petitions and feedback it received from the public.

The researcher was unable to find concrete evidence that the commitment has changed the status quo in civic participation at this time. Although the social accountability units and other structures exist to facilitate public engagement in governance at the local level, they were not fully functional, and citizens’ awareness of these units as mechanisms for civic participation was limited. Public accountability is also assessed as “did not change” for the same reasons stated under civic participation. Without active participation, local governments are not accountable to citizens. A measurable increase in citizen engagement with local government civic platforms would have resulted in a higher DOIG coding. Stakeholder interviews indicate that addressing citizens’ lack of knowledge of their rights and responsibilities and addressing the weak culture of civic engagement are central to achieving higher public participation in local government.