Bangladesh - Belgium

Citizens’ Voice and Accountability Evaluation – Bangladesh Country Case Study
citizen oversight mechanisms, notable the Auditor General’s Office and by extension
the (presently impotent) Parliamentary Committee structure. DFID’s project
implementation unit talk positively of the potential in the long term to move towards a
system of accountability driven by decent information on budget implementation and
impacts - with an oversight role for the Auditor General and with civil society
oversight at different levels - but cautions that progress is necessarily slow and
incremental. One observer commented: “we are talking here about evolution rather
than revolution”. One donor representative noted:
‘We would have liked to have done much more with government
accountability to citizens in FRMP and its predecessors but there was just so
many other, bigger, systemic needs to tackle first. Now (after 13 years) we
think we might be able to make some progress here’.
Donors have also “bundled up” support to enhanced accountability through
integrated projects supporting civil service reform (FMRP) or large sector
development programmes (e.g. LGED’s road and market improvement RDPs).
These elements have tended to get obscured, however, by the pressing and huge
demands of developing technical and financial systems. In the early projects of
LGED, community participation and local administration accountability were elements
of the programme but there was little support for these and little attention paid to
them (they were often supported by specially contracted in staff with little clout in
terms of changing attitudes and practice within the organisation). Donor insistence
on and funding for these elements over many cycles of projects has gradually
brought these to centre stage.
4.4 Changes in policy, practice, behaviour and power
relations
CVA interventions can produce changes at different levels and these can range from
direct outputs of a specific intervention which produce results at the very local level to
changes of policy and regulatory frameworks at the national level.
Depending on the level of the intervention, the Evaluation Framework for this study
identifies four types of changes for CVA interventions:
• Changes in policy: including the legal and regulatory framework (e.g. the
introduction or approval of new laws) and reform implementation (e.g. the
implementation of decentralisation policies)
• Changes in practice: these would include changes in the concrete provision of
information, improved transparency, equal access to services, inclusion and
consultation with marginalised groups, new/strengthened mechanisms to
exercise accountability, etc.
• Changes in behaviour: at the individual or collective level, signalling greater
awareness of CVA; more adequate and timely response of the authorities to
citizens demands; more responsible actions at the community level to ensure
greater participation of all citizens, etc.
• Changes in power relations: these refer to the ‘rules of the game’ and the extent
to which CVA interventions manage to redress unequal power relations between
citizens and the state, among different groups of citizens, between state actors at
the local and national level, between formal and informal institutions, progressive
and traditional societal groups, etc.
The CVA evaluation considered the following questions:
27