From the Ground Up: Improving Government Performance with Independent Monitoring Organizations

Chapter 7: Possibilities and lessons of independent monitoring

98 This book opened with a simple idea. No one is better placed to judge a government than those it governs, and no one is better positioned to monitor government services to ensure that they perform well and transparently than the citizens who use those services. The embodiment of this idea is the independent monitoring organization—typically a small group of analysts and advocates who assess government policies and services in the hope of improving transparency and performance. Independent monitoring organizations have a head start in assessing the government because their analysts are also citizens. They live with the government. They use its services and pay for them with their taxes. They have a sense of what government services are working well or poorly. Their experience leads them to ask questions and pursue issues that resonate with users. It helps them frame fairly narrow, manageable studies that can identify feasible reforms. It influences how they undertake every step of their investigation. And it provides them with an invaluable personal commitment to producing work that leads to real improvements in government services. This argument is intuitive. But it is not automatically true. While in theory independent monitoring organizations have an ideal vantage point from which to assess the government, they also face many obstacles. Rigorously assessing government performance is not easy. It requires funding, access to data, skilled analysts, analytical techniques appropriate to the questions being asked, and an interest in using unbiased research to frame solutions to problems. And there is no guarantee that rigorous assessment will lead to real improvements in government performance, a task that requires a new set of skills and understanding, as well as the commitment Chapter 7 Possibilities and lessons of independent monitoring Possibilities and lessons of independent monitoring 99 to developing realistic solutions and convincing decisionmakers and voters to adopt them. Without a clear purpose, time frame, and a little help along the way, the sheer complexity and Sisyphean nature of the enterprise might easily push an independent monitoring organization off track. This is where a program like the Transparency and Accountability Project can make a difference. It provides funding, structure, a rigorous timeline, a set of techniques and materials on using them, technical help as needed, examples, and—perhaps most important—an opportunity for peer review and the added inducement of friendly competition with like-minded organizations. The long-term effects of this one-time support for the independent monitoring organizations highlighted in this book cannot be known after such a brief pilot intervention. But the initial signs are remarkably promising. Not only did the organizations produce works of impressive quality, but each one would subject itself to the program again. They were unanimously pleased with their own work and with the process of engaging with other organizations doing similar work on the same timeline. In view of these positive results, this volume closes with a few thoughts on the lessons that can be drawn from the Transparency and Accountability Project. Lessons about independent monitoring organizations—from each step and the process as a whole Each step of the independent monitoring organizations’ work yields important lessons , as does the process as a whole. This section considers those lessons in detail. Selecting an analytical topic The first lesson is the seemingly inherent tendency of independent monitoring organizations to choose specific, manageable topics of local importance—and with a creativity that puts long-established techniques for monitoring governments to a wide range of novel uses. The Transparency and Accountability Project’s first request for proposals asked only that the independent monitoring organizations use program budgeting techniques to analyze spending. Even at that level of generality, the responses were remarkably varied and specific to pressing domestic issues. At the time, the Russian Federation was beginning to base its budgets on the performance of the previous year’s spending rather than on the previous year’s budgets, a shift that the federal government encouraged for regional governments. In this context, one independent monitoring organization asked whether performance-based budgeting could be detected in two Russian regions. In Indonesia, which had recently decentralized health and education financing, an independent monitoring organization proposed testing whether national, provincial, and district governments 100 Chapter 7 were meeting obligations, focusing on just three districts. In the Indian state of Karnataka an independent monitoring organization wanted to know whether the state government was realizing its stated...