Bangladesh - Belgium

Citizens’ Voice and Accountability Evaluation – Bangladesh Country Case Study
Movement to perform better or in order to fulfil the donors’ needs and own
frameworks for structure and accountability. Similarly, Rupantar feels it is expected to
spread the ‘Rupantar Approach’ and engage in national level advocacy. Since their
skills lie primarily in design, development and piloting of communication through
culture (creative aspects of programming) these demands require taking on more
staff and diversifying their skills. Strategic partnerships might be a more appropriate
approach but donors find it difficult to fund multiple partners and competition for funds
generally prohibits the ideal of channelling funds through one partner for subcontracting
of a range of supporting organisations.
An additional conundrum for donors looking to spend in this thematic area is that
enhancing CVA does not necessarily require large financial investment. For example
MMC indicated that if the UP Dialogue sessions could be funded for a few more
years this would ensure acceptance of this type of platform. BSSF manages its
awareness and advocacy programme primarily through its own funds raised by
member subscriptions. GTZ brokered dialogues are low cost and (arguably) effective.
Often hand-in-hand with attempts to scale up existing channels, processes and
mechanisms, is the donor tendency to try to control fluid and organic CVA activities
by “projectising” them. As with scaling up, projectising CVA can result in a number of
problems which threaten quality and sustainability with intervention processes as
follows:
• The outputs driven 25 nature of projects may encourage facilitating organisations
to intervene excessively to meet targets: as mentioned in section 4.4. in the ‘zeal
to meet targets’ direct intervention may undermine the process of relationship
building between citizen and state and de-rail chances of permanent institutional
change (e.g. LGED organises the meetings between UP and Communities, MMC
members felt that the dialogue sessions ‘needed’ MMC to organise them and
rallies and public debate may be taken over completely by Samata staff rather
than by Samata Movement Executive Committee).
• Donors mostly require projects to clearly articulate cause-effect logic
interventions (and use of log frames) and clearly define outcomes in order to
prove cost effectiveness and return on investments. There are problems with
this when supporting CVA interventions. Firstly, the behaviour change and
outcomes of advocacy are difficult to predict (often requiring the ’right moment’,
critical mass for support for change and external contextual changes (e.g. The
Caretaker Government has opened possibilities which were constrained before).
A ‘project’ may have an excellent advocacy programme which is trying to
influence legislation but there are systemic and human blocks to change over
which they have no control (e.g. Samata’s influence on the Ministry of Land). The
spontaneity and opportunistic nature of voice cannot be predicted in advance.
Secondly, too much emphasis on quantifying outputs can lead to ‘participation by
command’ (e.g. x number of consultations, y number workshops, z number
protest marches/rallies/observation of special days) without emphasis on who is
participating or not participating or what effect participation is having.
Thirdly, ‘projectisation’ leads to expectations that money can only be spent where
budgeted even if circumstances change. This lack of flexibility 26 can lead to
opportunities being missed or inefficient consolidation of lessons learned as
experience is gathered. For example the current Caretaker Government situation
25 E.g. numbers of events facilitated which are directly linked to specific budget lines. Donor
bureaucrats, often with limited experience of the working context, make demands on output
rather than outcome accountability.
26 This may be due more to rigid interpretation by accountants and administrators rather than
lack of understanding by sectoral experts in donor agencies.
34