Does citizen engagement improve development outcomes? A realist-informed systematic review of participation and accountability mechanisms

ABSTRACT

Effective, accountable and transparent institutions, that engage in inclusive and participatory governance, are crucial for the sustainability of global development investments. However, there is a debate about whether effective approaches to improving governance processes operate from the bottom up (e.g. by enabling citizens to hold service providers accountable) or the top down (by enabling service providers to be held accountable by the State). This paper systematically reviews participation and accountability mechanisms in a range of sectors, drawing on principles of realist evaluation to develop and test middle-range theory using framework synthesis and statistical meta-analysis. We show that interventions promoting citizen engagement through participatory priority setting or accountability mechanisms are often effective in stimulating active citizen engagement in service delivery and realising improvements in access to services, where they facilitate direct engagement between service users and front-line service providers, such as in health care. However, citizen engagement interventions alone are not effective where services are accessed independently of service provider staff, for example road infrastructure. Interventions promoting participation by increasing citizens’ pressures on politicians to hold providers to account are also not usually able to influence service delivery.

KEYWORDS:

• Participation
• inclusion
• transparency
• accountability
• systematic review
• realist review
• impact evaluation

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the United States Agency for International Development, via NORC [project number 7554.070.01].

Disclosure statement

The authors are not aware of any conflicts of interest, financial or intellectual, that affected the research process and outputs.

Declaration

The research topic was conceptualised with the funder, but the funder but had no role in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data, in the writing of the report, nor in the decision to submit the article for publication.

Notes

1. The theory of change built on the 2004 World Development Report (World Bank 2004), which articulated the importance of pro-poor governance practices that actively engage end users for effective outcomes, and Rahman and Robinson (2006) who articulated the importance of local ownership and long-term support. The assumptions and moderating factors drew on insights from Fox (2014), Page and Pande (2018), and the 2017 World Development Report (World Bank 2017).

2. The technical report on which this is article is based is published in Campbell Systematic Reviews (Waddington et al. 2019).

3. This required detailed information about both the governance intervention and standard public services access in the control or comparison, together with any cointerventions provided, information which is often scant in impact evaluations. For example, one study appeared to be an evaluation of an eligible participation mechanism (Andres et al. 2017), but was excluded after the full-text screening stage due to co-interventions that were not reported clearly in the evaluation, which were discovered in additional documentation (2009 World Bank Implementation Completion and Results Report) identified through targeted searches. The report described co-interventions that would likely have impacted the outcomes covered by the evaluation, including significant technical engineering assistance, infrastructure, and capacity building.

4. Hence, for negative (undesired) outcomes like corruption or mortality, transformations were made by multiplying SMD by −1.

5. Meta-analysis and meta-regressions were estimated with inverse-variance weights using the metan and metareg command in Stata (Harbord and Higgins 2008).

6. Studies and intervention components of studies were excluded for various reasons. The most common reason was that they were unable to estimate the marginal effect of the eligible PITA component of the intervention – in other words, where the evaluation measured the effect of a complex intervention including a PITA component packaged with other interventions. Most evaluations of community-driven development (CDD) were excluded for this reason (e.g. Casey, Glennerster, and Miguel 2012), as well as the CDD versus control arms in studies that were eligible for inclusion in the review (Beath, Christia, and Enikolopov 2013; Humphreys, de la Sierra, and van der Windt 2014). Other CDD studies that were included evaluated social mobilisation prior to roll-out of the block grants application process (Giné, Khalid, and Mansuri 2018) or applied enhanced citizen engagement to standard CDD (Fiala and Premand 2018). Studies were also excluded where they acted to reduce citizen engagement, such as a ‘recentralisation’ intervention which reduced participation (Malesky, Nguyen, and Tran 2013), or if they only measured immediate outcomes (civic engagement and provider responsiveness) rather than access to or use of services or wellbeing (Finkel 2012; Gottlieb, 2016; Grossman, Humphreys, and Sacramone-Lutz 2014; Grossman et al., 2016; Sexton 2022; Sheely 2015; Yanez-Pagans and Machicado-Salas 2014).

7. Findings from the replication of Björkman and Svensson (2009) (Donato and Garcia Mosqueira 2016) were also included in analysis.

8. The full list of variables collected under each outcome category is presented in the study protocol (Waddington et al. 2018, 2019).

9. Underlying the figure are meta-analyses for outcome sub-groups, which are presented in Waddington et al. (2019).

10. Banerjee et al. (2018) also argued that providing information about eligibility and prices created common knowledge.

11. For example, searches of the Experiments in Governance and Politics (EGAP) registry yielded 22 studies under ‘participation’ and 34 under ‘accountability’ (https://egap.org/registry/accessed 11 March 2021).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the United States Agency for International Development [7554.070.01].