Background
Recent reforms of the state have focused on creating new patterns of state-society relations around the public provisioning of social and other services. If the first generation of reforms focused on macro-economic stability and, more often than not, entailed reducing public expenditures, subsequent (2 nd generation) reforms have focused on public services and have been guided by a trinity of decentralisation, citizen participation, and the pluralisation of providers. These reforms have sought to increase the responsiveness and quality of services by breaking the power, often monopoly power, of relatively centralised public provisioning, with reforms that are believed to give users greater power and leverage. Decentralisation, participation and pluralisation, it is argued, offer choice and bring decision making about service provision more ‘proximate' to end users or clients, who as a consequence have greater ability to hold providers accountable and demand more or better quality services (Batley 2004). Proximity between providers and users/clients is expected to lead to greater accountability and responsiveness (World Bank 2004).
There are at least three problems with this view. One is the assumption that all three types of reforms push in the same direction, and do so irrespective of the type of good. Second, there is an assumption that it is citizen action of some form– through choice or voice in particular – that will increase responsiveness. Finally there is an underlying assumption that institutional changes (e.g. decentralization, participation or pluralization) will automatically lead citizens to engage with providers, make demands and elicit greater reponsiveness. In fact, there is virtually no evidence to suggest that individual citizens are effective agents in holding either public or private providers to account, and securing greater responsiveness. If the citizens are among the under-served, the urban lower-middle class or poor, then this expectation seems particularly misplaced given what we know today.
Objectives
The research will f ocus on collective actors rather than individuals, and instead of assuming a universal institutional logic or effect that pushes in the same direction, we leave open the relationship between decentralisation, participation, and pluralisation and their impacts on collective action.
Specifically, the study explores two related questions:
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How have the reforms impacted on the ability of citizens to organise in civil organisations and engage collectively with policy makers?
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When does sustained engagement of civil organisations lead to greater responsiveness of either policies and/or implementation?
While the study is centrally concerned with the effects of institutional change, we anticipate that the answers to the posed questions above will be affected by characteristics both of the polities and of the services we will be studying.
Methodology
Identifying the impact of new institutional models on the capacity for collective action of societal groups, and the responsiveness of service delivery to this collective action, requires examining episodes of state-society interaction over time and from multiple angles. The need for multiple angles suggests combining methods and types of data in innovative ways. We intend to carry out the research from three distinct angles, each of which is produced by a distinct types of method:
- Analysing cases policy reform processes
- Analysing networks of civil society and policy actors
- Examining outputs of policies
The three principal researchers share responsibility for developing the framing and methodological approach of the study, and for the writing up of the publications and dissemination). All three will also take a lead role in interviewing policy actors (societal and state) for the case studies in the three cities. They will, further, be responsible for coordinating the fieldwork in each of the cities: Dr Peter P. Houtzager and Dr Adrian Gurza Lavalle will share responsibility for the research in São Paulo and Mexico City, Dr Anuradha Joshi for Delhi.
Researchers
Main:
Dr Anuradha Joshi - IDS Brighton UK - Governance Research Fellow and also Convenor of this Programme
Dr Peter Houtzager - (project principle investigator) - IDS Brighton UK - Governance Research Fellow
Dr Adrian Gurza Lavalle - CEBRAP, Brazil
Other Researchers involved with this project:
Monika Dowbor, Researcher CEBRAP, Brazil
Graziela Castello, Researcher, CEBRAP, Brazil
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