How to make citizens more responsible, involved and effective

The public, especially in countries like India, is frustrated with the inability of governmental institutions to adequately resolve the wide range of difficult issues facing them. The good news is that an ever-growing number of people have been demanding to be brought into the decision-making process in a meaningful way. Citizens want to be involved from beginning to the end in governance matters.

Stories of constructive citizen intervention abound in India. The latest is the Anna Hazare movement. However, no structure for such an intervention has been documented. This essay attempts to do exactly that. It will save time and effort on the part of governmental bodies wanting to involve citizens more meaningfully.

First, we should try to understand why even honest Governments fail to involve citizens to a non-negligible extent. Research has shown that the primary reason for the same is that the Governments don’t trust the judgment of its citizens. The graph below shows it very clearly.



Of course, another important reason is the widely held belief that it is the reluctance to share power that stops Governments from distributing power among its citizens.

Indeed, in the current Governance landscape in India, with numerous pressure groups and nervous bureaucracy (more so, because of vote-collecting but non-implementable laws like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), Citizen Involvement may well be seen as adding too much delay but little value.

As an example, take the case of the recent agitation for a strong Lokpal Bill. With so many different views and opinions of so many intellectuals debating 24 hours a day on public forums, the demands became a khichdi more than anything else. The issue becomes graver because of the ever-increasing vote-bank politics which makes efforts to please everyone and offend no one.

Many Problems have been unnecessarily demonized due to these issues. Some of them are…

•          Public sector debt
•          Restructuring of the economy
•          Welfare reform
•          Deterioration of Infrastructure
•          Waste-management

All these problems can be easily solved by effective community involvement. This includes…

•          Progressive politicians
•          Open and Shared Leadership
•          Progressive bureaucracy
•          Media involvement
•          Active citizen groups
•          Free flow of information
•          Co-operative (as against political) unions
•          Co-operation in the community

To ensure successful citizen participation, two things need to work…

•          Willingness of Governing bodies to involve citizens
•          Governing bodies have the skill to conduct public participation

The first issue is complicated and involves changing the political climate. In this article, we will focus on ways to enable the second one.

Literature divides the second issue into eight main segments. Let us take them one by one.

          

         Community Assessment: This is one of the most neglected features of community involvement and also one of the most important. Existing community strengths and weaknesses should be identified.

          

         Structured Government: This exerts a significant influence on the nature and extent of community involvement. Electoral system should be representative and bureaucracy should be structured with clear demarcations of authority and power.

          

         Leadership: The quality of Leaders in public life is one of the most serious problems facing India today. This can be fully solved only when the youth of our country take up politics.

          

         Independent Research: This is another huge problem in India. Citizen involvement, even when it happens, depends upon the research of the Government. Ready availability of independent research may be extremely important for some issues.

          

         Good Facilitators: Ability to facilitate public discourse is a seldom noticed but very important part of community involvement.

          

         Collaborative Decision-making: Communities should be trained in Collaborative Decision-making such as that which happens in legislatures.

          

         Problem Solving: This may seem obvious but its importance can’t be over-emphasized. The ability to actually follow a systematic and tested problem-solving approach is critical to success in any such initiative.

          

         Conflict Management: A neglected but no less important feature is management of conflicts since it would come over and over again in community involvement.

Finally, high performance isn’t the exclusive responsibility of the Government. Citizens have an important role to play in becoming better-informed and more-involved in the running of their Governments.

Good citizenship is hard work and involves much more than voting or attending an occasional public meeting.

- C. Bens