Lower Mekong countries could take on social accountability as a sub-region

by Dondon Parafina

Countries in the Lower Mekong sub-region, composed of Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam, are slowly but decisively making strides in social accountability. ANSA-EAP is happy to be part of this process.

Cambodia, for instance, has been a priority for ANSA-EAP since 2008. Despite the challenges in its socio-political setting, we saw great potential in pursuing the social accountability agenda for the country, at least as a learning exercise for both government and civil society. And indeed for the past seven years, ANSA-EAP’s presence in Cambodia has thrived; our social accountability initiatives have continued to gain ground.

Fulfilling Constitutional Mandate: Involving The Youth in Social Accountability Initiatives

Political Science students listening attentively to the Social Accountability and

Open Contracting lesson.  They will then be required to submit outputs based

on experiences in applying what they have learned.

by Chad Patrick Osorio

Open Contracting (OC) can be viewed both as a strategy and a tool for Social Accountability.  It refers to government disclosure and citizen participation in the public contracting process, from the inception stage and planning to the performance and delivery of contractual obligations, involving constructive engagement between government and citizens in the entire decision-making and implementing process. Its goals are for better facilities and infrastructures, more efficient delivery of goods and services, and the furtherance of the protection of the rights and welfare of the population. In sum, the OC advocacy aims to promote the efficient, effective and economic use of public funds through collaborative efforts of civic engagement.

Clearly, the role of citizens in Open Contracting is essential, as it forms a pillar on which the entire process stands. Citizenry is composed of a number of actors, including organized civil society groups lobbying for common causes, local communities, and various social sectors. One of these key groups is the youth.

Rethinking Partnership

by Vivien Suerte-Cortez

Partnership-building is one of the interesting challenges under ANSA-EAP’s Citizen Participatory Audit (CPA) project. Most standard legal references define partnerships as people or groups who share equal responsibility for profits, losses, debts, and liabilities in a business. Several governance books will introduce you to keywords like cooperation, mutual interests, shared goals and responsibilities. Research further and you’ll eventually stumble upon a definition that says -- “a collaborative relationship between entities to work toward shared objectives through a mutually agreed division of labor” (World Bank, 1998).

In a nutshell, one can say that partnerships are a means to an end. From here we can assume that certain pre-conditions must be met -- objectives identified and shared, motivations made clear, power and resources assessed and leveraged, and mechanisms for effective communication established. The concepts are easy to understand but putting this into practice raises the challenge several notches. In the realm of business, the nature of partnerships can be seen as clear as day because profits, losses, debts and liabilities are (relatively) easy to quantify. But how does one operationalize partnerships in governance when power, resources, benefits, and risks are unequally distributed among interested parties? At the risk of sounding poetic, we sometimes feel that just when we think that the answer is within grasp, it suddenly disappears like a mirage.

Reflecting on policy research for SAc: Crafting a regional research agenda

by Randee Cabaces

ANSA EAP’s operations team (or secretariat) recently set for itself the task of influencing policy-making in the region towards the adoption of social accountability (SAc) as an approach to good governance. This is, of course, just one among several strategic objectives that the secretariat has identified for the next three years of the network’s life (dubbed earlier as its “consolidation phase”). So, by 2016, the regional hub dreams of becoming a recognized “think tank” for SAc-related policy issues in this part of the globe.

Dream big or dream bigger, otherwise don’t dream at all, right?

Still intoxicated by the outputs from that strategic planning session, and titillated by this new role as the network’s research lead, I went through the process of creating a mind map for the research cluster’s strategy for 2013.

Social Accountability in EAP: The search for common ground

"When I accepted the leadership role in ANSA-EAP and started to reflect on the work and responsibilities awaiting me, I was confronted once more with the question of our regional mandate. If the organization is to truly serve its purpose, which will, of course, define and determine its sustainability, it has to offer something that could be regionally shared and communicated, understood and applied."

by Dondon Parafina

I call it a new adventure! Taking on the Executive Director’s post for a regional organization covering East Asia and Pacific is, to say the least, challenging because to me, the region remains an unfamiliar terrain.

I am not new to ANSA East Asia-Pacific. I was the Network Coordinator for four years, right at the time when we were establishing partnerships in the four countries we prioritized in the initial project phase—Cambodia, Indonesia, Mongolia, and the Philippines. In many forums and conversations we had, I would always hear myself and others remark that the countries in the region are too varied—in language, political structure and dynamics, economic status, religion, historical influences, and perhaps even in their favorite sports! And note here that I only had East Asia in mind. It gets even more complex when the Pacific becomes part of the picture.

Social accountability and public health

This is the fourth of a series of columns on the G-Watch program of the Ateneo School of Government. For this piece, I look at how we worked with the local government of Dumaguete City on how to employ social accountability to deliver health services more effectively.

Many health services have, by law, been decentralized or devolved to local government units (especially concerning basic health care). 2010 statistics by the World Health Organization show US$142 spent per Filipino for health services, while statistics for Philhealth for the same year show coverage of less than forty percent of Filipinos: deplorably poor numbers, considering that health is critical to economic productivity and development. This makes every public centavo spent on effective medical services all the more important, for its relative scarcity, to prevent and preempt sickness and death. Dumaguete City in Negros Oriental provided the Government Watch (G-Watch) team the opportunity to help the city ensure the best returns from those scarce centavos—or, perhaps, G-Watch provided Dumaguete City the opportunity to demonstrate the city’s good faith in spending those centavos, considering City Mayor Chikiting Sagarbarria’s promise to project director Joy Aceron: “I have nothing to hide.” Or how many offi
cials in participating barangays went out of their way to provide space and snacks for monitors. Or how, though civil society still expressed the usual skepticism about public officials, the local YMCA director Greg Fernandez would opine that the local government was well-intentioned.

Considering G-Watch’s admission that Dumaguete City wasn’t even on their initial shortlist for the localization pilot run, to encounter the local government unit (LGU)’s generally welcoming attitude is fortuitous as it is appreciated.

Dumaguete City’s health program distributes medical resources from city level to barangay health centers (BHC)—not just medicines: Dumaguete prides itself in being the only city to deploy one nurse each to every BHC. These nurses would oversee the city’s Safe Motherhood and Family Planning Program, the Child Care Program, and the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases Program. This would certainly explain why health receives a large portion of the city budget—and the LGU’s desire to ensure accountability for the significant expenditure, a concern shared by both LGU and civil society. Apart from wasteful expenditures or graft, the city’s setup of devolving health services to the barangay level also created risk openings for political patronage.

The Dumaguete LGU, civil society organizations (CSO), and G-Watch branded the partnership “Subay Kahimsog”, Visayan for “Tracking/Pursuing Health.” Though initial enthusiasm for the project was high, all stakeholders soon realized the gravity of their pursuit. G-Watch recalls how LGU and civil society stakeholders were “bemused” by the extensive details of monitoring health services delivery. Visayan Forum director Marelen Pepino noted the reluctance of some health CSOs to participate as monitors, fearing lack of sustainability (in the end, she managed to convince them to participate, though the project noted an insufficient number of CSO volunteers). Many of the volunteer monitors were young, she added, and in their inexperience, “they held the G-Watch team in awe.”

Daunting the task may have been, but the returns of Subay Kahimsog were fruitful and significant. Monitors were able to identify some lapses and insufficiencies at the BHCs—broken or insufficient medical refrigerators, physicians not prescribing the medicines made available by the city, some barangays not allocating their own money for health; lack of coordination and documentation. Such lapses can be rectified with the proper attention, and is in fact the “feedback” purpose of citizen monitoring.

Citizen monitoring isn’t just about fault-finding. Subay Kahimsog also revealed that, deficiencies aside, the Dumaguete City health program is itself fruitful and significant, generally helping barangays meet the medical needs of their constituents. Their admirable deployment of nurses, in particular, was seen to ensure proper management and quality control of BHCs. Equally admirable was the professional and friendly service offered by BHC personnel, practically health with a smile. There are lessons for other LGUs to learn from here.

Such lessons are not limited to health services delivery, either. Whatever wariness and suspicion there was between government officials and civil society volunteers, it seemed the enthusiasm for citizen monitoring on both sides managed to bridge any gaps, soothe any fears. Perhaps it helped that the volunteers themselves, or the sectors they represented, had good reason to see a working health care system: the youth, women and children’s rights advocates, and even the local kasambahay (household helper) group, SUMAPI (so enthusiastic they were, they even readily volunteered more members than G-Watch needed).

Perhaps, most of all, it’s because this is what governance is supposed to be: to formulate, adopt, execute, and adjust as necessary, policies aimed for the common good, on the basis of sound information. That this is what democracy is supposed to be: participatory, open government and an active citizenry. That this is what accountability is supposed to be: ordinary people able to understand the effectiveness and efficiency of public policy—and even help define the standards of “effective” and “efficient”, being the beneficiaries of policy. And Dumaguete City provides hope that this promise can be achieved in the rest of the country.

The writer is Dean of the Ateneo School of Government (ASoG)  and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in East Asia and the Pacific (ANSA-EAP).  This essay was first published in the 11 October 2011 online and print edition of the Manila Standard Today. It is featured in VOICES with the writer's permission. Dean La Viña can be reached through e-mail at tonylavs (at) gmail.com and twitter: tonylavs

Re-examining ANSA EAP's assumptions on cultural appropriateness as a pillar of an enabling environment for SAc

by Randee Cabaces

Reading Larry Diamond's "The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World" made me reflect on ANSA-EAP's fourth pillar of social accountability (SAc), an enabling environment for SAc - "cultural appropriateness".

ANSA-EAP's framing of this pillar has always moved along two (2) tracks - not necessarily related:

1. SAc tools or citizen monitoring instruments are often developed with specific governance issues or problems in mind. Thus, the need to customize whenever we apply them to another context. Example, a citizen report card (CRC) or community Score Card (CSC) conducted in a city context (like Bangalore, India) to get citizen feedback on public services (like electricity, transportation, sewerage, etc.) would need some tweaking when used to monitor the health center services in a rural community which were provided as part of a mining company's local development commitments in Benguet, Philippines
   
   
2. SAc approaches have to take into account Asians' different value system when it comes to public leadership, democratic practice and good governance. Some explanations or elaborations on this that I've encountered in ANSA-EAP's discourse during the past three years: the concept of "headship" as our particular brand of Asian leadership, our inclination to communal rather than individual conception of rights, conflict avoidance and face-saving as common attitudes in public engagements, the tendency to look at the polity as a "bigger family" with public officials as heads of that family whose will can not be easily challenged, our penchant to maintain social order rather than promote divisive public debates, etc.

Insufficient Armchairs

By: Eucensio B. Carbonilla
 

Education nowadays is a very important solution against poverty.  Education is everybody’s foundation to attain success in life. But all of this is impossible to achieve if schools are not equipped with the materials and facilities needed by the students. In essence, education is one way to minimize poverty.

As a civil society organization in partnership with the Department of Education, the SBMC-CORE team visited some schools in Don Marcelino, Davao del Sur.  Don Marcelino is a third class municipality in the province of Davao del Sur. According to the 01 May 2010 census, it has a population of 41,942 people and is composed of 15 barangays.  Barangay Baluntaya is found in Don Marcelino.  Baluntaya Elementary School and Don Marcelino National High School can be found in this remote barangay.

Citizens Query

Citizens query is part of the Social Contracts for Political Accountability, it is

"a binding written agreement between the stakeholders (i.e. those who govern and the governed) aimed at fostering transparent and accountable governance. They are tools for social accountability initiated by citizen groups to hold public officials, politicians and service providers to account for their conduct and performance in terms of service delivery, mandated responsibilities and public obligations. SCPA is aimed at ensuring regular interactive dialogue between citizen-voters and the specific government/political actor concerned, to fulfil their commitments to the development agenda defined in public platforms."

Citizens Query is the last of ANSA-EAP's Tales Tools and Techniques of Social Accountability series of videos, the others in the series are:

1. Bantay Lansangan;
2. Bantay Eskuwela; and
3. G-Watch Story

Social Accountability in Oil and Gas Exploration

by Emy Perez

With the Philippine government poised to award oil and gas exploration contracts in July, can Social Accountability frame the engagement?

Mining has dominated the discourse on Extractive Industries in the Philippines for some time now.  The social, environmental, health issues are palpable because the operations are in communities.

It is quite different with oil and gas, that operate mostly offshore, at a distance that communities may hardly see or feel the impact on their lives and their resources.  ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ is a convenient alibi for not engaging communities; it may also be the reason for civil society organizations not participating in the discussions.  Or, simply, that there had not been a platform for participation.

Bantay Lansangan

Bantay Lansangan is a partnership that seeks to mobilize a multi-sectoral group composed of non-government, private stakeholders, and official development partners to work with the DPWH and other government stakeholder agencies in enhancing the delivery of quality national road services responsive to user’s needs, through more efficient and transparent use of public resources, thereby providing value for money and integrity.

The partnership will increase transparency and access to information and monitor DPWH performance in delivering national road services. It is expected to reduce transaction costs for road construction and maintenance, improve response times for maintenance, increase road user satisfaction, and improve the public perception of DPWH.



ANSA-EAP documented the Bantay Lansangan experience, the project’s conceptual design, operational framework, relationship between its secretariat and local partners, modes of partnership, and terms of engagement among partners, among others. The case study includes stories that describe the model and the experiences of local Bantay Lansangan partners in Iloilo, Kalinga, and Abra provinces.

Open Doors 2012: Highlights of the first day

During the WELCOME REMARKS (A. Gregorio-Medel, ANSA-EAP), we heard how ANSA-EAP is fueled by dynamic partnerships with practitioners:

• Since its inception in 2008, ANSA-EAP has been welcoming novel ideas from citizen partners, including the young.
• The sustainability of governance reform rests on dynamic and constructive partnerships. Like “mabuhay! (long live!)”, the Filipino greeting used to welcome friends, ANSA-EAP has been aiming to give life to multistakeholder partnerships between and among government, civil society, and citizens in its four priority countries—Cambodia, Indonesia, Mongolia, Philippines—and in the other countries in the region.
• At this juncture, the network is wrapping up its entry phase and transitioning to a more dynamic state (consolidation phase). Four years is too short to give life to the social accountability mission.
• The network stands on the shoulders of its partners. Together, we continue to approximate the vision of a better world through social accountability (SAc).

Bantay Eskwela

Bantay Eskwela is an initiative of Procurement Watch, Incorporated (PWI), which signed a Memorandum of Agreement with the Department of Education to take procurement monitoring to the grassroots level. It aims to safeguard not just the quantity, but also the quality of school furniture in public schools.

PWI tapped the Parent’s-Teacher’s Associations, especially their presidents, to make up the core of its volunteers. PWI trained this group on the basics of procurement monitoring, especially at the points of tendering, pre- and actual delivery, providing them with the forms and templates used for actual monitoring. These forms include the purchase orders, order forms and delivery forms.

The G-Watch Story

Following from the introduction to the tales, tools and techniques of social accountability comes the G-Watch story. How an intrepid band of volunteers was able to maximize the number textbooks  delivered to public schools in the Philippines while at the same time lowering the cost of each textbook for the government.

Introduction - Tales, Tools and Techniques of Social Accountability

Social accountability in action

By Dr. Antonio G.M. La Viña  

This is the seventh and final column in this series (written with the research assistance of my brilliant collaborator Christian Laluna) where we explore the concept of social accountability: what it means, what it entails from its practitioners, and what its potential benefits are to governance, to citizens, the community, and the nation. We have set it as an alternative to mainstream governance, where policy-making, execution, and especially accountability are mainly in the hands of government officials. We have emphasized the democratic, citizen-building character of social accountability. In today’s final column, I will be talking about social accountability in action, using as examples the CheckMySchool.org and Government Watch (G-Watch) initiatives, the former of which was created with the assistance of Affiliated Network for East Asia and the Pacific (ANSA-EAP) and the latter a long-standing program in the Ateneo School of Government

Of all the policy areas of government, there may be no more critical priority than education, as reflected in the weight of the budget given to the Department of Education (DepEd). At the same time, the money and investments in other resources (such as textbooks and educational materials, construction of classrooms) poured into DepEd makes the department one of the most tempting targets for graft and for corrupt activities, as shown in the past by the high-profile “noodle” and “textbook” scams, where government had to pay for overpriced noodles and erroneous textbooks. In Robbed: An Investigation of Corruption in Philippine Education, Yvonne Chua of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism found that corruption was so institutionalized in education policy, both nationally and at the local level, that “payoffs have become the lubricant that makes [DepEd] run smoothly.” It is lamentable that corrupt practices would be necessary just for policies to push forward. Transparency and accountability became the watchwords for DepEd reform.

What G-Watch and CheckMySchool.org have done was to put as much of the responsibilities of transparency and accountability as could be placed into the hands of ordinary yet committed citizens, using established and workable mechanisms and tools. G-Watch covers electoral reform and human rights in its agenda as well, but it is in monitoring the delivery of educational services that the initiative had cut its teeth. Through the Textbook Count Project, for example, and in cooperation with DepEd, G-Watch gave citizen groups the means to monitor the bidding for, and production and delivery of textbooks across the country. With training and tools, diverse groups and peoples such as parents, students, village and church leaders, and Boy and Girl Scout troops were able monitor the cost, quantity, and quality of textbook delivery, and that the bidding and delivery process observed the proper procedures.

Social accountability and leadership

By Dr. Antonio G.M. La Viña 

In this sixth of seven columns on social accountability, I explore the costs of social accountability. The truth is the greatest benefits often ask for the corresponding price. Public policies such as government fiscal stability, land reform, universal health care, education, and the like could require sacrifices borne by different sectors of society. Politics is the dynamic with which people decide how these costs are to be equitably distributed. The problem is that in practice, either these costs are either not equitably distributed, or perceived as so. As revealed in previous columns, this is often the result of ordinary men and women, communities, and sectors of society excluded from, or not participating in, the formal policy-making process.

Dissatisfaction with policy, whether justified or not, is in the end inimical to both governance and community. Only a couple of weeks ago has the country seen what happens when grievances entrench government and society against each other, in the transport and PALEA strikes, and protests in response to budget cuts to health and education. This is indeed a communication problem, but not in the traditional idea of “the people speak, the government listens” and vice-versa (incidentally, that arena is covered by the Freedom of Information Act, which was discussed last week). We must move beyond mere exchange of ideas, interests, and positions into the realm of participation, walking together in each other’s shoes. This is the realm of social accountability.

 As the Affiliated Network on Social Accountability - East Asia Pacific (ANSA-EAP) has learned, an emphasis on mainstreaming social accountability aims to reverse this cycle of policy and protest by involving them in the policy process from the start. Part of the light at the end of the tunnel comes from educating citizens on the costs of policy and policy reform, true to the organization’s “Learning in Action” mantra, by exposing government and civilian parties to each other’s predicaments and perspectives in each stage of the process.

Social accountability and freedom of information

By Dr. Antonio G.M. La Viña

Access to information is critical for social accountability and governance at large. Most crucial therefore of the tools that promote social accountability is the freedom of information bill which continues to be pending in Congress. For this reason, I devote the fifth column of my social accountability series on this matter.

While this has been announced as a priority of President Benigno Aquino III almost from his inauguration, it is almost disheartening to note that more than a year has passed since his election to the Presidency without significant progress in getting the bill through Congress, and that he had been virtually silent on the matter in his last State-of-the-Nation Address (although he subsequently addressed the issue in media). To date, the matter is still under “careful study”, which has saddened if not angered government reform activists.

Disappointed as I am about developments, I am not inclined at the moment to either lay blame on him or anyone else for the bill’s stalled status, or to consider this a betrayal of the public trust by people involved. Even well-meaning policies like FOI must pass through the formal legislative process in order to properly become law, and compete with other demands on the government’s agenda. Also, a policy reform as transformative as FOI will naturally encounter much inertia from affected officials, bureaucracies, and interests. The reality is that sustaining far-reaching policies will require much political capital. I am quite familiar with this, in experiences ranging from protecting vulnerable forests while in the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, to the painstaking negotiations for peace in Mindanao (as both an observer-consultant and once as part of the government negotiating panel). Governance is a very costly business, which demands the utmost care from its practitioners.

A Report Back to my Colleagues and Partners in ANSA EAP

Greetings from the just ended WB Annual Meetings for Fall 2011!

It is with gladness that I share with you some news and thoughts about some exciting things I have learned during the flurry of activities, conversations, advocacies and sharing in this gathering of CSOs for the WB annual meeting.

As you note ANSA EAP has not been investing much time and effort establishing presence in the many consultations and gathering of CSOs on the global level. This is due to our decision to focus our efforts especially during the start up phase of ANSA EAP - to the much needed work of consolidating the CSO networks towards a social accountability framing and perspective.

As I compose this letter, I look back to the time before ANSA EAP when the work of social accountability was seeded in the 2007 consultations held in Tagaytay, Philippines. In this event, Mary McNeil of the World Bank Institute in Washington DC and Andrew Parker of the WB Country Office in Manila, joined Phil CSO leaders in dialogue as they shared their analyses, programs, and initiatives in pushing a demand for good governance agenda and linking it to the concept of social accountability.

Social accountability, antidote to corruption

By Dr. Antonio G.M. La Viña 

With this column, I resume the series on social accountability which I began last month. So far as I have written three columns on the subject: introducing this new governance tool, discussing how it could be mainstreamed, and defining it. In this column, I will examine the utility of social accountability as a solution to corruption, a timely topic given the recent re-arrest of ex-General Carlos Garcia to serve his court-martial sentence.

When we speak of anti-corruption, the popular images which appear to the layman’s mind are that of the “crusading, crime-busting official” (usually the Ombudsman, especially now with former Justice Conchita Carpio-Morales in the office) or the “lone voice in the wilderness”, often personified by the whistleblower (such as Clarrisa Ocampo, Jun Lozada) or a conscientious, compassionate public servant (like Heidi Mendoza) against an insensitive and corrupt bureaucracy. Yet the battle for efficient, effective, and responsive governance is one that is not successfully fought alone.

As the old adage goes, “it’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon.” More accurately, it is a relay race: more than one participant contribute to sustaining the effort towards the finish line. In fact, it is sad to reiterate that one reason why anti-corruption has yielded sluggish results in the Philippines is that we, as citizens, demand clean government yet fail to supply resources to make such government successful and sustainable.