Co-Producing Civic Engagement

Introduction

The majority of Indian citizens do not know who their elected representatives at the municipal level are and for those that do, contact and address details of city Corporators or Councillors and that of their offices are not easily available. Municipal corporations do have websites, but the data is more often than not either missing or not updated.

Which department? Which office? Which official? How is public policy supposed to work if the “public” in question has no meaningful interface with governance mechanisms? Even the most nascent internet startup knows that engagement and frictionless interfacing is key to delivering value. How can we expect democracy and public policy to deliver any value with such inadequate interfacing?

Intervention & Research

The Civic Data Project is building a first-of-its-kind mobile application which provides information and contact details of municipal elected representatives (corporators/councillors) along with ward-wise information and the contacts of department heads and inspectors (sanitation, revenue, and so forth) who are directly responsible for the deployment of public goods and services through the process of co-production with citizens, municipal employees and councillors.

By harnessing the power of data, technology, and rigorous research, the project will build an accessible, easy to navigate mobile application and website driven by superior technological infrastructure for users across all demographics with information in English and regional languages. Data will be collected and maintained through the principles of citizen science by crowdsourcing and updating data from citizens and also incentivising municipal employees to volunteer information in return for visibility of their work.

Research Question: Even if information on whom to contact for public grievances is available to citizens, what can motivate municipal employees and councillors to redress citizen grievances or ensure timely delivery of public goods? 

The project draws from research on the factors influencing the delivery of public goods at the municipal level to conceptualise its intervention. The purpose of this project is to not just build a civic data portal that makes crucial civic data accessible to citizens, but to pick up from the findings of Nobel Prize winning economist Abhijit Banerjee et al‘s research showing how information on councillors’ achievements being made public incentivises councillors to discharge their public spending commitments. Similarly, the project investigates if making the role of municipal employees and the service of front-line workers––who are the first points of contact for citizens––visible along with that of councillors in a co-produced civic engagement platform will incentivise employees to discharge their responsibilities efficiently.

By having a dedicated page on the portal where the work of municipal employees, councillors and front-line workers is creatively presented,  the project will examine, through backend reporting by citizens on whether their grievance was addressed or not, how local governance and the delivery of public goods could be contingent on employee recognition, particularly for low to mid level employees, including contract workers, in a government machinery that is vast and whose internal workings are opaque to citizens.

In addition, with superior tracking of platform usage and internal feedback forms where citizens can write about their experiences of dealing with a particular department, the project hopes to provide concerned bureaucrat stakeholders a comprehensive report on citizen grievance patterns across regions and identify gaps within the system across the public goods delivery chain.

Our mission, thus, is not just to create a digital public good in the form of a nation-wide scalable civic data portal, but to ideate, through the experiment of “visibilizing” the work of state functionaries, on creating a two-way data flow which can be used for the betterment of both sides.

We hope that the launch and usage of the app can have the following insights for policy makers:

• The efficacy and nature of citizen participation in building and shaping civic society interventions through the example of crowdsourced data.
• The expectations of municipal employees who lie along the chain of delivery of public goods by examining the impact public recognition has on the efficiency of delivering public goods and services.
• Gaps in delivery of public goods based on feedback from citizens who reached out to various departments through their comments.
• An overview of which the most pressing areas of concern are in every ward based on data from citizen grievances .

If our hypothesis that municipal employees may be more likely to discharge their responsibilities of addressing citizen complaints when there is visibility for their work were to hold true––this is built from Abhijit Banerjee et al’s finding that this holds true for councillors in Delhi––, then one can begin to think of how the government machinery at the low-to-mid level hierarchies can be shaped to include more employee autonomy and visibility in the context of local governance. This will become something that cannot be ignored if it has a massive bearing on the redressal of civic issues.

– Our tracking of citizen complaints can offer crucial data to see problem areas ward-wise and  region-wise. However, it doesn’t stop there. It is coupled with our comments form where citizens can tell us whether a problem was resolved or not and what their experience with dealing with the department head or councillor was. This then, becomes crucial primary data about the status quo of civic issue redressals and from these citizen experiences, stakeholders can begin to see what specific issues are cropping up at the point of contact. The comments form is actually a well crafted research questionnaire that seeks to elicit responses from citizens from the context of them actually having engaged with state-functionaries and helps us track the lifecycle of a complaint and the various factors associated with its redressal, its timeline or its non-redressal.

-If this project shows that co-production indeed builds a better ecosystem for civic engagement and problem redressal, then it makes a case for more stringent policies to be brought in for the monitoring and tracking of ward committee meetings, which, though mandated to happen periodically in the ward and demands the attendance of the councillor, municipal employees and citizens, does not happen (BBMP Report). That aside, importantly, the success or failure of this novel experiment of co-production and crowdsourcing for local governance can inform policy makers on the nature of citizen participation in local governance, which is a growing conversation around the world, and can point policy makers to which of its aspects work, which do not, and in what context, thus helping leverage citizen participation in various domains or withdraw it where not relevant.