Local governance and social accountability

Abstract

Local Governance process directly affects the life and livelihood of the marginalized people of the community. Local people should have the right to make local institutes socially accountable while implementing any development activities. In Bangladesh, the public Administration Reform commission recommended citizen’s charter in 2000 to strengthen democratic governance particularly where local government institutions and processes accountability fail to effective delivery of services requires social accountability. The constitution of People’s Republic of Bangladesh values the people first in governance system. There is a growing need that public sector service delivery should be participatory. This participatory approach ensures social accountability because this approach helps raise public voices to claim their rights and question any possible erosion of integrity in the process of delivering development and services. (Aminuzzaman,Salahuddin) Social accountability encompasses an ever widening- spectrum of concepts and practices. The social accountability system promotes the power of demand side approaches in enhancing governance through the concepts of citizen’s voice, accountability and responsiveness. Marginalized groups of poverty prone areas in Bangladesh are being deprived in getting access to services provided by local government. Social accountability mechanism can upgrade state citizen relationship resulting in an efficient service delivery. The study tried to find out the obstacles and constraints to analyze the root causes and to recommend how people can raise their voice and participate in the local governance process in promoting socially accountable local governance. The study reveals if tools and techniques of social accountability can be applied it will promote efficient service delivery as they are willing to get (64.71%) trainings on capacity building, social awareness, gender development, leadership development, budgeting and budget tracking. 70% of the respondents, view LGI’s as corrupted organization and 60% of them think LGIs will perform better if citizen monitor their activities. 50 people from marginalized Saontal community were asked questions from a structured questionnaire consisting of 35 questions and 10 people joined in FGD session in which they were asked 8 questions regarding local governance and social accountability in Godagari Upazilla of Rajshahi district. The study recommends that both local people and local government should be trained, political influence should be reduced, local government should have adequate resources and power to control while involving local poor. Central government’s role should be supportive rather than influencing in promotion local governance and social accountability.