Citizen engagement in public services in low‐ and middle‐income countries: A mixed‐methods systematic review of participation, inclusion, transparency and accountability (PITA) initiatives

Abstract

Background: How do governance interventions that engage citizens in public service delivery planning, management and oversight impact the quality of and access to services and citizens' quality of life? This systematic review examined high quality evidence from 35 citizen engagement programmes in low-and middle-income countries that promote the engagement of citizens in service delivery through four routes: participation (participatory priority setting); inclusion of marginalised groups; transparency (information on rights and public service performance), and/or citizen efforts to ensure public service accountability (citizen feedback and monitoring); collectively, PITA mechanisms. We collected quantitative and qualitative data from the included studies and used statistical meta-analysis and realist-informed framework synthesis to analyse the findings.Results: The findings suggest that interventions promoting citizen engagement by improving direct engagement between service users and service providers, are often effective in stimulating active citizen engagement in service delivery and realising improvements in access to services and quality of service provision, particularly for services that involve direct interaction between citizens and providers. However, in the absence of complementary interventions to address bottlenecks around service provider supply chains and service use, citizen engagement interventions alone may not improve key wellbeing outcomes for target communities or state-society relations. In addition, interventions promoting citizen engagement by increasing citizen pressures on politicians to hold providers to account, are not usually able to influence service delivery. Conclusions:The citizen engagement interventions studied were more likely to be successful: (1) where the programme targeted a service that citizens access directly from front-line staff, such as healthcare, as opposed to services accessed independently of service provider staff, such as roads; (2) where implementers were able to generate active support and buy-in for the intervention from both citizens and front-line public ---

Multi-Criteria Frameworks to Improve Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Environmental Governance in the Amazon

“…Those objectives in turn each have multiple attributes. Waddington et al (2019) draw on the public service provision literature in developing countries to propose the more elegant "PITA" framework, which stands for participation, inclusion, transparency, and accountability. Those elements are commonly noted in the broader governance literature and are thus standard requisites for governance.…”

“…While Bennett and Satterfield (2018) Further, the three frameworks differ in their substance. While all three sources include participation, inclusion, and accountability, Bennett and Satterfield (2018) add criteria for adaptation and flexibility; Waddington et al (2019) and Vizeu Pinheiro et al (2020) include transparency. The latter pays particular attention to the role of the state in regulation, rights, and justice.…”

“…The latter pays particular attention to the role of the state in regulation, rights, and justice. Both Bennett and Satterfield (2018) and Waddington et al (2019) highlight issues of access to information, coordination among stakeholders, and capacity for planning and implementation. It becomes evident that each source makes distinct contributions that could be used to construct a more integrated framework for the evaluation of EG.…”

“…We therefore pursued the integration of the evaluation frameworks from Bennett and Satterfield (2018); Waddington et al (2019), andVizeu Pinheiro et al (2020), shown in Table 1. We proceeded by first listing the evaluation criteria in each framework.…”

“…This exercise produced 11 distinct criteria for evaluation of EG. In Table 1 at the left, we present the criteria from Bennett and Satterfield (2018) in blue, Waddington et al (2019) in green, and Vizeu Pinheiro et al (2020) in orange. At the right, we relate the evaluation criteria in our sources to the criteria we identified for our integrated framework.…”