Department of Theology Spring Term 2016
Master's Thesis in Human Rights 30 ECTS
The Role of Civil Society in Hindering Corruption
A Case Study about Participatory Budgeting and Social Accountability in Albania
Author: Sanna Eliasson Supervisor: Oscar Almén
Abstract
Participatory budgeting is a tool that can be used to improve social accountability within public institutions through increasing the participation of citizens in decision-making processes about the distribution of public funds. The global experiences from the use of participatory budgeting indicate that the impact of the initiatives has ranged from very weak to highly successful, and that the successfulness depends on certain factors in the environment where it is implemented – even though there is no agreement on what these factors are.
Albania is one of the countries where a range of civil society organizations are implementing participatory budgeting initiatives and is at the same time a country that faces one of the highest corruption levels in Europe. Despite the fact that these initiatives could bring very important impacts, very little academic research is done on this topic. The purpose of this thesis was therefore to investigate to what extent the participatory budgeting initiatives in Albania have improved social accountability in the Albanian societies, as well as what factors that have affected this impact and how.
The investigation was carried out as a case study in Albania where nine different participatory budgeting initiatives were examined through conducting semi-structured interviews with the organizations implementing these projects, as well as one expert organization that has helped the other organizations to improve their knowledge on the tool and one public official from a municipality involved in one of the initiatives. The research of this thesis found that the Albanian participatory budgeting initiatives have succeeded to do minor improvements on social accountability through strengthening the voice of the citizens and the enforcement mechanism, while formal answerability still is low and negatively affects the sustainability of these improvements. It was further found that seventeen factors from five different categories have affected the ability of the initiatives to improve social accountability – some more than others. These categories were: formal and informal political systems, supportive legal and policy frameworks, local capacity and knowledge, free media institutions, and availability of information. The contributions of the thesis included also the finding of a factor that was not mentioned by the theory (trust by local governments in civil society organizations), as well as a structure on how these influencing factors interact with each other.
Key words: participatory budgeting, social accountability, corruption, Albania.
Acknowledgements
The investigation of this thesis would not have been able to realize without the help of a few highly valuable persons. I would like to express my appreciation and sincere gratitude to:
All my eleven respondents who kindly offered me their time and their views on the successes and challenges of participatory budgeting in the Albanian context.
Plejada Gugashi at Olof Palme International Center in Albania who gave me the opportunity to be inspired by this topic during my internship period and who facilitated the access to relevant documents for this research.
Oscar Almén at the Department of Government at Uppsala University who assisted me as a supervisor and helped me to develop my thinking around the topic of this thesis.
Family and friends who believed in this thesis idea and in my capacity to realize it.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ... 1
1.1 Aim ... 2
1.2 Research questions ... 2
1.3 Disposition ... 2
2. Theory & Previous Research ... 2
2.1 Corruption & Accountability ... 3
2.2 Social Accountability ... 4
2.3 Participatory Budgeting ... 6
2.3.1 Five Types of Participation ... 6
2.3.2 Influencing Factors ... 7
2.4 Theoretical Framework ... 9
2.5 Previous Research on Participatory Budgeting in Albania ... 11
3. Method ... 13
3.1 Case Study ... 13
3.2 Review of Project Reports ... 14
3.3 Semi-‐structured interviews ... 14
4. Albanian Context ... 18
5. Results & Analysis ... 19
5.1 Impact on Social Accountability ... 19
5.1.1 Voice ... 20
5.1.2 Answerability ... 22
5.1.3 Enforceability ... 24
5.1.4 Impact: To What Extent? ... 27
5.2 Interacting Variables in the Albanian Context ... 28
5.2.1 Capacity of Civil Society ... 29
5.2.2 Willingness of Local Government ... 34
6. Conclusion ... 43
7. Discussion ... 46
8. References ... 47
Appendix I: Map of Albanian Municipalities ... 50
Appendix II: List of respondents ... 51
Appendix III: Interview Questions to Organizations ... 52
Appendix IV: Interview Questions to Public Official ... 53
1. Introduction
In recent years, a number of international documents that acknowledge the destructive effects of corruption on human rights protection and sustainable development have been signed within the United Nations structures and other regional human rights bodies. Corruption in public institutions is argued to hinder the compliance of social, economic and cultural rights, as well as civil and political. The social, economic and cultural rights are often threatened because of unsatisfactory delivery of public services, which often is a consequence of public resources being spent for private or political gains. When the citizens feel that their political leaders do not care enough about the needs of the community it is further a risk that the political system will loose legitimacy and that the citizens become discouraged from using their civil and political rights, as well as demanding these rights to be respected.1
Due to all the negative effects that corruption can create in areas where it is prevalent, it has become one of the main aspects that are present in international aid and development cooperation projects. How to tackle the challenge of reducing corruption in the best way has been and are still discussed within the international community. What is being agreed on is that it has to be tackled from different angles and on different levels. Common anti-corruption strategies include everything from the setting up of auditing institutions, raising salaries of public officials, to creating budget-tracking systems and stronger laws for public procurements. However, what has become more and more clear throughout the years is that the civil society has an important role to play. The reason behind this might be the insight that it is hard to make the political institutions improve if there is no pressure from the citizens to do so. Along with this idea more focus has been put to projects trying to strengthen social accountability among the power-holders by civil society organizations.
One of the tools used around the world to enhance social accountability is called participatory budgeting. By including the citizens in the decision-making processes about how and where the public resources should be spent, it is argued to facilitate the process of holding the power-holders to account and further to an extent hindering corruption.2 The experiences from all over the world indicates that participatory budgeting initiatives implemented have ranged from very weak to highly successful, while it is claimed that the successfulness depends on certain factors in the environment where it is implemented.3 Notwithstanding this claim, there is still no agreement about what these factors are.
Albania is one of the countries where the tool of participatory budgeting has been and is being used by a range of civil society organizations. According to Transparency International, Albania is at the same time one of most corrupt counties in Europe.4 This societal problem is something that many actors within the country are working on to improve. Due to the fact that
1 OHCHR. Human Rights and anti-corruption.
2 Wampler. A guide to Participatory Budgeting, 21.
3 ibid, 22.
4 Transparency International. Visualising Corruption Perception Index 2014.
Albania in addition became a candidate country to the European Union in 2014, the country faces even harder pressure to make progress in this area.5 Because of this situation, Albania is a country where participatory budgeting projects by theory could create an important impact.
In spite of this and the fact that many Albanian civil society organizations are using this tool, very little research is done on the impact, or lack of impact, by the participatory budgeting initiatives implemented in the country.
1.1 Aim
The aim of this thesis is to investigate the impact on social accountability by participatory budgeting initiatives implemented by civil society organizations in Albania, as well as examining the factors that have affected the impact of these initiatives in the Albanian context. While the outcome of this study hopefully will contribute to the almost non-existent academic research on the topic chosen, it could also serve as a help for the civil society organizations using the tool in Albania to improve, and for organizations all over the world that want to start using it and are interested to know about the extent of success in Albania and possible reasons behind it.
1.2 Research questions
The research questions of this thesis are the following: To what extent have participatory budgeting initiatives in Albania improved social accountability in the Albanian society? What factors have affected this impact and how?
1.3 Disposition
Chapter 2 covers theory and previous research on corruption, accountability, social accountability, participatory budgeting and participatory budgeting in Albania. It includes as well the theoretical framework of this thesis. Chapter 3 describes the method used in the research. It explains the cases of the case study, the review of reports and the semi-structured interviews conducted. Chapter 4 gives background information about Albania in order to explain more thoroughly the context in which the participatory budgeting initiatives have been implemented. Chapter 5 presents and analyzes all the results found from the investigation. Chapter 6 summarizes the findings of the thesis and chapter 7 discusses them in a bigger picture. References are presented in chapter 8.
2. Theory & Previous Research
This chapter will outline theory and previous research when it comes to corruption, accountability, social accountability, participatory budgeting and participatory budgeting in Albania. It will in addition present the theoretical framework of this thesis.
2.1 Corruption & Accountability
In the 1990’s, when the global political context changed after the post-war order, much of the political focus that had been put on international power- and security issues was now
5 European Commission. Albania Progress Report 2015.
redirected towards internal affairs of the states.6 In this time it became clear that no nation is immune to the destructive impact of corruption7 and that it is a major burden on societies.8 Despite centuries of efforts there is no single definition of corruption that is accepted by all researchers or practioners. However, there are some pervading ideas here that could be conceptualized. Rose-Ackerman, among others9, means that corruption should be understood as the “misuse of public power for private or political gain”.10
The definition of corruption as the ‘misuse of public power for private or political gain’ builds on the idea of a power relationship between a principal and an agent. In the case of power in the public arena the citizens act as the principals and the decision-makers as the agents. In this relationship the former entrust the latter to make decisions on behalf of their interests, in order to attain a set of desired outcomes defined by the principals.11 Corruption does therefore imply a violation of the duty taken by the agent to act according to the interests of the principals.12 Andvig et al. discusses further around what factors that make agents to pursue their own interests instead of the interests of the principals. They mean that the agents make cost-benefit analyses of the probability of facing potential costs of corruption against the benefits that it would entail.13 If the politicians perceive the cost of corruption (consequences and their probability) to be lower than what they would benefit from being corrupt, they will most likely violate their obligation for private or political gains.
Many donors and governments have responded to these challenges of corruption by initiatives directed to improving public sector accountability. Baez-Camargo argues that accountability is a “process within a principal-agent relationship” where “the behavior and performance of the agent is evaluated against pre-determined standards by the principal and misdeeds are sanctioned accordingly”.14 This mechanism entails that when principals are engaged in the evaluation of the behavior of the agents and in sanctioning their wrongdoings, the agents are less likely to violate their obligations and to be corrupt. If connecting this to the idea of a cost- benefit analysis, it would mean that politicians perceive the cost of corruption to be higher if the citizens are aware of their behavior, evaluate it and impose sanctions when the behavior does not conform to the expectations of the citizens.
Accountability as a mechanism can take various forms. One common way to concretize the concept is to distinguish between horizontal and vertical accountability.15 O’Donnell
6 Heywood. Political Corruption, 419.
7 ibid, 418.
8 Rothstein. The Quality of Government, Ch. 10.
9 Klitgaard. Tropical Gangsters, 221 & Graf Lambsdorff. The Institutional Economics of Corruption and Reform.
10 Rose-Ackerman. The Challenge of Poor Governance and Corruption, 1.
11 Rose-Ackerman. Corruption: a study in political economy, 6.
12 Rose-Ackerman. Corruption and Government, 225.
13 Andvig et al. Corruption: A Review of Contemporary Research, 80.
14 Baez-Camargo. Accountability for Better Healthcare Provision, 6.
15 Ahmad. Governance, Social Accountability and the civil society, 11 & Grimes. The conditions of successful civil society involvement in combating corruption, 2.
describes horizontal accountability as concerned with the efficient function of the system of checks and balances of the governmental structure.16 It “refers to the formal power that institutions have to monitor and sanction one another”.17 Vertical accountability does he further define as formal elections, but also other mechanisms that citizens use to control their governments.18 The official elections are one way for the citizens to hold the politicians accountable, since they might vote their representatives out of office if they do not behave according to the mandate given by the voters in the latest election. As a part of the vertical dimension can we also find another mechanism that has been given increased attention in recent years – it is called social accountability and will be examined in the next section.
2.2 Social Accountability
According to Baez Camargo & Jacobs does social accountability refer to “formal and informal mechanisms through which citizens and/or civil society organizations engage to bring state officials or service providers to account.”19 The direct involvement of citizens is what differentiates social accountability from other established mechanisms of accountability.20 In formal elections citizens are only able to choose between a predetermined set of representatives and exert accountability during the election period. Social accountability, on the other hand, makes it possible to monitor the behavior and decisions of the politicians also during the time in-between elections.21 To understand more deeply what social accountability is, we need to elaborate on the elements that constitute the mechanism.
Departing from the social accountability definition of Baez Camargo & Jacobs, they continue to discuss on what significant components it comprises. They argue that social accountability involves three core elements: “voice, enforceability and answerability.”22 Voice is perceived as “a variety of mechanisms – formal and informal – through which people express their preferences, opinions and views and demand accountability from power-holders.”23 This is something different than just a collection of complaints or comments and is based on three conditions that need to be fulfilled. Firstly, citizens need to be aware of their rights and entitlements, as well as the obligations of the politicians, in order to effectively participate in the monitoring of the public sector performance. Secondly, the opinions of individual citizens must be accumulated and articulated. Thirdly and lastly, the accumulated opinions need to be transmitted to relevant decisions-makers that can act upon the feedback.24
Enforceability is understood as a “situation where, when the mandate is not appropriately fulfilled, consequences are expected to exist and be executed.”25 This is seen as a decisive
16 O’Donnell. Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies, 38.
17 Grimes. The conditions of successful civil society involvement in combating corruption, 2.
18 O’Donnell. Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies, 38.
19 Baez Camargo & Jacobs. Social Accountability and its Conceptual Challenges, 7.
20 Malena, Forster & Sing. Social Accountability, 1.
21 ibid, 3.
22 Baez Camargo & Jacobs. Social Accountability and its Conceptual Challenges, 10.
23 UNDP. Fostering Social Accountability, 11.
24 Baez Camargo & Jacobs. Social Accountability and its Conceptual Challenges, 10.
25 ibid, 10.
aspect in determining the initiatives of the politicians to either act accordingly to the demands of the citizens or not.26 The aspect of enforceability can thus clearly be connected to the cost- benefit analysis that politicians make when considering to violate their obligations.
Answerability is further defined as “the obligation to provide an account and the right to get a response.”27 It can be perceived as “voice triggering a response” from the authority.28 These three core elements are closely connected to each other and the link between them will be explained more thoroughly below.
If we recall the definition of accountability as a process where “the behavior and performance of the agent is evaluated against the pre-determined standards by the principals and misdeeds are sanctioned accordingly”29, we need to start by considering what these ‘pre-determined standards’ are. These standards can be seen as the mandate that the citizens as principals have given to the decision-makers as agents. The mandate is created through the voice of the citizens – their preferences, opinions and views – either expressed through formal elections or in other ways in-between them. If the voice element is weak, the mandate of the decision- makers becomes weak as a consequence. When the citizens do not express any expectations on the behavior and decisions of the politicians, there are few parameters to evaluate their performance against and it is hard to demand accountability.
When voice is exercised and transmitted to the decision-makers, the citizens do in turn expect a response from the power-holders. Preferably the citizens want to hear that the politicians are behaving according to the their expectations, but in some cases could the citizens also be satisfied by getting a reasonable explanation if the expectations are not met. The aspect of transparency, which exists when the answerability mechanism is strong, is crucial when it comes to creating voice, but also to enforceability. When the citizens face a strong answerability among the politicians it is easier for the citizens to get an understanding of the behavior of the decision-makers and thereby make evaluations and form opinions about it.
Furthermore, enforceability depends on existing answerability. If the politicians do not inform about and justify their decisions, it is also hard for the citizens to know about and sanction their misdeeds accordingly. Baez Camargo & Jacobs argue that all of these three core elements need to be present, at least to some extent, for social accountability initiatives to have a “meaningful and sustainable impact”.30
This section has attempted to reflect about social accountability as a concept, what elements it includes and how the different parts of the mechanism are related to each other. The next question that can be put forward is what social accountability initiatives can look like in practice. As policymakers and international donors in recent years have come to deem social accountability as one of the more promising approaches to improve accountability of power-
26 Baez Camargo & Jacobs. Social Accountability and its Conceptual Challenges, 10.
27 UNDP. Fostering Social Accountability, 8.
28 Baez Camargo & Jacobs. Social Accountability and its Conceptual Challenges, 10.
29 Baez-Camargo. Accountability for Better Healthcare Provision, 6.
30 Baez Camargo & Jacobs. Social Accountability and its Conceptual Challenges, 11.
holders in a bottom-up process31, it is possible to find numerous examples of tools that are used to reach an impact. Social accountability initiatives range from participatory budgeting, community scorecards, and social audits to public expenditure tracking.32 Participatory budgeting is the tool that this thesis covers and it will therefore be examined in more detail.
2.3 Participatory Budgeting
Participatory budgeting is, according to Wampler, a “process through which citizens deliberate and negotiate over the distribution of public resources.”33 Initiatives of participatory budgeting are initiated either by governments (local or national), non- governmental organizations or civil society organizations to give citizens the opportunity to participate directly in deciding how and where public resources ought to be spent.34 When citizens do participate in planning, funding, delivering and monitoring of public spending it is expected to put pressure on the decision-makers and they will become more accountable for their behavior.35 This is further argued to result in less corruption and in improved efficiency of the government.36
2.3.1 Five Types of Participation
Fölscher distinguishes between five different types of participation that citizens can be use in order make an impact on the budget process. Four of these does she derive from McGee &
Norton,37 and one she adds to the theory herself. These five types include “information generation”, “information sharing, consultation, joint decision making and initiation and control by stakeholders.”38 McGee & Norton claim that the closer the participatory practices get to initiation and control by stakeholders, the more effective will the practices of participation be.39 Information generation means that citizens or civil society organizations carry out a budget analysis and then spread their findings to the community.40 This is seen as a first step to make the public aware of what the budget and its process do look like. When the citizens are aware they can make more informed choices in elections, they can choose to advocate for changes, and at the same time politicians themselves could start to better reflect about their decisions or behavior. When it comes to information sharing the politicians take the initiative to spread information about the planned budget to the public, which in the majority of the cases also creates some space for the citizens to lift their opinions about what has been presented.41 Consultation includes some sort of mechanism that the government has set up to gather information on the public opinions and preferences. Examples of this could be forums, councils, surveys or referendums.42 In joint decision-making the citizens do not only
31 Baez Camargo & Jacobs. Social Accountability and its Conceptual Challenges, 7.
32 ibid, 15.
33 Wampler. A Guide to Participatory Budgeting, 21.
34 ibid, 21.
35 Fölscher. Participatory Budgeting in Asia, 158.
36 ibid, 158.
37 McGee & Norton. Participation in Poverty Reduction Strategies, 14-15.
38 Fölscher. Participatory Budgeting in Central and Eastern Europe, 134.
39 McGee & Norton. Participation in Poverty Reduction Strategies, 14-15.
40 Fölscher. Participatory Budgeting in Central and Eastern Europe, 135.
41 ibid, 247.
42 ibid, 247.
provide information about their views, they are also a part of the decisions.43 Some formal power is delegated to citizens in this case. The last type of participation gives the public the highest level of possible power over the budget or part of it – initiation and control by stakeholders. It indicates that citizens “have direct control over the full process of developing, raising funds for, and implementing projects or policy”44.
If connecting these different types of participation in budget processes to the elements of social accountability, it is possible to expect that information gathering and information sharing might be needed for the citizens to create a voice, and that consultations, joint decision-making and projects that are initiated and controlled by the public make good opportunities for the public to exercise their voice. Further, one might suppose that the answerability element will be stronger in those situations where the citizens have arenas to make their voice heard – consultations, joint decision-making and so on – since the community has been able to present their expectations to the politicians in a way accepted by both parts. The extent to which enforceability will exist depends on the two other elements. If voice is exercised successfully and the answerability is enhanced through participatory initiatives, it is reasonably to assume that it makes it easier for the public to sanction misdeeds of politicians, that the politicians themselves will feel this pressure and therefore include this risk in their own cost-benefit analyses.
The discussion above has covered social accountability as a concept and a mechanism, as well as the elements it comprises. It has also examined participatory budgeting as a tool and how it might improve social accountability. What is left to assess is what successes that previous participatory budgeting initiatives have obtained when it comes to creating social accountability, and what research says about the factors that have been affecting the impact in these cases.
2.3.2 Influencing Factors
Goldfrank, Fölscher and Shall have studied participatory budgeting initiatives and their results in different parts of the world. Goldfrank have examined case studies of participatory budgeting in different Latin American countries (Bolivia, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Peru), while Fölscher have studied Central and Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria), Asia (India, Philippines, Thailand and Bangladesh), Middle East and Northern Africa (Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq and Lebanon), and Shall have investigated cases from Sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe).45 In their studies they find participatory budgeting initiatives that range from highly successful to very weak.46 From their research they all agree that the successfulness of these initiatives is enabled by certain factors in the social, political and economic environment that need to exist in order to improve social accountability in the geographical area of implementation.47 If the
43 Fölscher. Appendix: A Primer on Effective Participation, 247.
44 ibid, 247.
45 Shah. Participatory Budgeting, Ch. 3-7.
46 Wampler. A Guide to Participatory Budgeting, 22.
47 Wampler. A Guide to Participatory Budgeting, 22.
factors do not exist in the context their absence might instead contribute to a disabling environment. Fölscher summarizes these factors into five categories: formal and informal political systems, supportive legal and policy frameworks, local capacity and knowledge, free media institutions, and availability of information.
Formal and informal political systems include democratic governance, contestability in the party system, government legitimacy, and willingness of the decision-makers.48 Participatory budgeting needs a political system where decision-making is open to public debate and where it is possible to criticize those in power. If citizens are not able to express their opinions in public, the basic mechanism of participatory budgeting will not function. The same goes for official elections. If the inhabitants are not able to vote politicians out of office, the decision- makers will probably see very few reasons to listen to the demands of the people.
Contestability in the party systems means that there are multiple parties competing about the power in a democratic system. When there are several political parties that are competing for the votes, the probability is higher that the parties will listen to the voice of the citizens, since the parties are dependent on the support of the people. Government legitimacy means that the community believes that their government (local or national) is legitimate. Some degree of legitimacy is essential before citizens want to engage or cooperate with the government at all.
Finally, the successes of the participatory budgeting initiatives are in many cases dependent on the willingness of the government to let the citizens participate in the process. If the decision-makers do not want to involve the people, many types of participation in the budget process cannot take place.
Supportive legal and policy frameworks cover all legal aspects that might enable initiatives of participatory budgeting. Among other laws, it is important to highlight the civil liberties and laws that directly might regulate citizen participation in public affairs.49 Rights as the freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and the right of access to information facilitates the participatory process through making it possible for citizens to be aware of what is happening in the public arena, to assemble in order to create a strong voice and to make the community able to express their views openly. In addition, there might be national laws that in specific regulate the relationship between the citizens and the decision-makers, also in detail participation in the budget processes.
Local capacity and knowledge encompass the government, the citizens, and the civil society organizations.50 What concerns the capacity of the government it is important to consider both human and economic resources. The decision-makers need to know how to manage a budget process in a participatory manner and they need to have financial means to implement the demands of the community. The citizens need to have knowledge about their rights to engage in public issues and at the same time a willingness to do so, while the civil society
48 Fölscher. Appendix: A Primer on Effective Participation, 247-251.
49 ibid, 251-252.
50 ibid, 252-253.
organizations need to have knowledge on participatory budgeting, ability to mobilize citizens and the financial resources for organizing activities connected to participatory budgeting.51 Free media institutions mean that the media can operate freely in the society and function as a facilitator of participatory budgeting.52 Media institutions that disseminate information from the government to the citizens about events of the budget calendar, discuss current issues about resource decisions and communicating about the outcomes of those practices help citizens in strengthening their initiatives. The media can also be an important tool for citizens and civil society organization to increase their impact. This is highly relevant when they need to spread information to the general public – information about the budget process and priorities or about the behavior of decision-makers.
Availability of information on public funds indicates that citizens and civil society organizations need access to information in order to participate.53 All types of participation require a minimum level of transparency. Citizens and civil society organizations cannot participate in decisions about the budget if they are not aware of the process and the content of it. The ability to participate does therefore depend on the information received and when it is obtained.
2.4 Theoretical Framework
Deriving from the theory and previous research presented in this chapter, the theoretical framework for this investigation will here be explained. Based on the two research questions chosen we have one independent and one dependent variable. In addition to these we have also a number of interacting variables. As shown in table 1 on next page, the independent variable of this research is participatory budgeting and the dependent variable social accountability, since we want to know the extent to which participatory budgeting has improved social accountability in Albania. Within the relation between participatory budgeting and social accountability, we have further five categories of factors that are expected to interact and affect the outcome. These factors are categorized by Fölscher and include formal and informal political systems, supportive and legal policy framework, local capacity and knowledge, free media institutions, and availability of information.54
51 Fölscher. Appendix: A Primer on Effective Participation, 253.
52 ibid, 253-254.
53 ibid, 254.
54 ibid, 247-254
Independent Variable Interacting Variables Dependent Variable
Participatory Budgeting Formal & informal political systems 1. Democratic governance
2. Contestability in party system 3. Legitimacy of local government 4. Willingness of local government
Supportive legal & policy framework 5. Civil liberties
6. Specific laws
Local capacity & knowledge 7. Knowledge of local government
8. Financial resources of local government 9. Knowledge of civil society organization 10. Financial resources of civil society organization
11. Ability to mobilize citizens by civil society organization
12. Interest of citizens
Free media institutions
13. Share information from local government 14. Share information from civil society
Availability of information
15. Information shared without requests 16. Information shared because of requests
Social Accountability - Voice
- Answerability - Enforceability
Figure 1. (Created by author)
For the concept of participatory budgeting we use the definition of Wampler. He argues that participatory budgeting is a “process through which citizens deliberate and negotiate over the distribution of public resources.”55 Participatory budgeting means in our case the Albanian participatory budgeting initiatives examined within the research of this thesis. Even though there might be various goals set up and outcomes expected from using the tool of participatory budgeting, we expect in this thesis that participatory budgeting initiatives has the potential to improve social accountability. Fölscher means that this is the case, because
“officials get more accountable for the choices they make on behalf of the citizens” when
“citizens are engaged in planning, funding, delivering, and monitoring public goods and services.”56
55 Wampler. A Guide to Participatory Budgeting, 21.
56 Fölscher. Participatory Budgeting in Asia, 158.
When it comes to social accountability, we define it as Baez Camargo & Jacobs do. Social accountability “refers to formal and informal mechanisms through which citizens and/or civil society organizations engage to bring state officials or service providers to account.”57 We do further also use the three core elements of social accountability that they mention as “voice, enforceability and answerability.”58 This thesis will investigate the impact by the Albanian participatory budgeting initiatives on these three core elements in order find out their contribution to social accountability. To examine the impact on voice, enforceability and answerability, these elements are operationalized in figure 2. The operationalization is based on the definitions of Baez Camargo & Jacobs, but formulated by the author.
Voice Answerability Enforceability
Definition: a variety of mechanisms – formal and informal – through which people express their
preferences, opinions and views and demand accountability from power-holders.
Operationalization:
• Citizens are aware of their rights to be included in decision-making processes and on the obligations of the decision-makers to listen.
• Opinions of individual citizens are accumulated and common demands are formed.
• Relevant decision-makers have are aware of the demands of the citizens.
Definition: the obligation of the decision-makers to provide an account and the right of the citizens to get a response.
Operationalization:
• Decision-makers share information about their work and decisions on their own initiatives.
• Decision-makers respond positively when citizens request information about their work and decisions.
Definition: a situation where, when the decision-makers do not appropriately fulfill the mandate, consequences are expected to exist and be executed.
Operationalization:
• Decision-makers are responsive to the demands of the citizens, because they expect that they will face too severe punishments by the citizens if they are not.
Figure 2. (Created by author)
2.5 Previous Research on Participatory Budgeting in Albania
What concerns the question of participatory budgeting in Albania – to what extent such initiatives have improved social accountability in the country and what factors that have affect the impact in the Albanian context – the amount of earlier research is very limited.
57 Baez Camargo & Jacobs. Social Accountability and its Conceptual Challenges, 7.
58 ibid, 10.
Dauti from Washington University touches upon the issue in her article about the outcomes of participatory decision-making in one Albanian municipality – Kucova. She studied a case where the municipality leaders took the initiative, assisted by USAID as a donor, to create a citizen commission where the citizens were supposed to give input to the public officials on the strategies, decisions and budget of the municipality. This initiative is not named as participatory budgeting, but it might be relevant to bring up because of all the similarities. The citizen commission was established in 1998 and community members were invited to participate and give recommendations to the municipal leaders during processes of decision- making.59 Those who were invited had key positions in the public sector, the private sector and the civil society, or they were retired professionals active during the communist dictatorship.60 In her study Dauti found that this top-down approach of including citizens in decision-making created good, but limited, results. She found that the majority of the community members who participated received more knowledge on how the local government works and they became more aware of the difficulties that local officials face in providing investments and services, but that this is not sufficient in empowering the community to hold the municipality leaders accountable.61 Dauti therefore advised that these top-down approaches of inclusion must be complemented by a bottom-up approach to create more promising impacts in a context that has a deficit on democratic traditions.62 She argued that this is important in order to avoid elite capture of the process, to empower the general public to ask for their rights to be included in decision-making processes, and to be able to mobilize pressure from the community if the municipality leaders do not behave as they should.
Apart from the research of Dauti, there is one more article found on the topic of participatory budgeting in Albania and its impact. This article covers a case of participatory budgeting in the municipality of Kamez and is written by Ph.D./Ph.D. candidates from different Albanian universities, where one of them is the mayor of Kamez municipality himself. The article describes participatory budgeting as a tool to create “transparency, accountability and social inclusion in the local government”, that the municipality included certain interest groups to discuss about the fiscal package, and what the outcome of the fiscal package were.63 What the article does not bring up is how the different interests groups from the community were involved in the processes, how many they were, what they demanded or how their opinions where taken into account by the municipality leaders.
The search for earlier research on the topic of participatory budgeting in Albania might be restricted due to the low knowledge of the Albanian language by the author. English was the main language used to search for this information. There might be additional research on the topic in Albanian that the was not found, even though the experts of the tool that the author met during the field study agreed on the issue that there is very little professional research
59 Dauti. Outcomes of Participatory Decision Making, 227.
60 ibid, 231.
61 ibid, 228.
62 ibid, 226.
63 Mziu, Shehu & Xarba.. Tools that Improve the Local Governing-Budgeting with Participation, 270.
done about participatory budgeting in Albania. This thesis will most likely therefore contribute to the discourse by making a nationwide investigation about the impacts of different participatory budgeting initiatives on social accountability in the Albanian society and what factors that have been affecting the impacts of these.
3. Method
Based on the research questions of this thesis, the time allocated for its realization and previous research, the investigation was carried out as a case study in Albania during three weeks in March 2016. This chapter will cover details about how this research was carried out.
3.1 Case Study
During the realization of the case study in Albania, different participatory budgeting initiatives in different parts of the country were examined. The initiatives chosen were selected based on one main aspect – the contacts of the author. During the autumn of 2015 the author lived in Albania for four months while making an internship at the Swedish donor organization Olof Palme International Center. Olof Palme International Center supports civil society organizations in Albania to help increase transparency and accountability in the country. In this work they support organizations that are using the tool of participatory budgeting. During the internship period the author came in contact with these organizations and because of the limited time for the case study it was reasonable to start examine the initiatives of the organizations connected to Olof Palme International Center.
The positive aspects of this form of sampling were that it made it easier to find organizations that were willing to take their time to help with the research and to obtain documents about the initiatives from the donor organization to which the civil society organizations report about their activities. One negative aspect is that the samples could be seen as unrepresentative for Albanian participatory budgeting initiatives in general because of being connected to the same donor. The author had this aspect in mind during the case study and did therefore take measures to try to limit the possible negative impact. When the initiatives connected to Olof Palme International Center had been examined, the author tried to get in contact with other organizations that have been working with participatory budgeting in the country. Unfortunately no response was obtained from these organizations. Because of this, the research was limited to participatory budgeting initiatives connected to Olof Palme International Center. This fact affects of course the ability to generalize the results found from the research. Even tough it is hard to expect that the Albanian context might influence participatory budgeting initiatives differently because of being supported by different donors, the likelihood remains and should not be ignored.
Nine participatory budgeting initiatives were investigated. These initiatives have been implemented by different civil society organizations in different municipalities:64
64 See map of the Albanian municipalitites Appendix I.
1. Children’s Human Rights Centre Albania (Tirana) 2. New Epoch (Fier)
3. Association for Integration of Informal Areas (Kamez) 4. Center for Youth Progress (Kukes)
5. Civil Society Development Center Durres (Durres) 6. Young Intellectuals, Hope (Shkoder)
7. Albanian Center for Population and Development (Vlora) 8. Vlora Youth Center (Vlora)
9. Gender Alliance for Development Center (Tirana)
The contexts in which these initiatives have been implemented differ when it comes to for example the size of the municipalities and the political party in power. What concerns the implementing organizations, they differ as well in size, but the ways of implementing participatory budgeting have been similar. An additional common aspect of these initiatives is that the organizations have only used the method for a few years time. In the following sections it will be described how these different participatory budgeting initiatives were examined within the research.
3.2 Review of Project Reports
The first part of the investigation was made up by a review of reports about the participatory budgeting initiatives examined in this thesis. The reports included information about what the objectives of the participatory budgeting initiatives have been, what activities the civil society organizations have done on this topic in their geographical areas during the last years, and to what extent they have reached their planned goals. The information in the documents did not give any direct answers to the research questions, but it served to create a better understanding of the initiatives that was used in the creation of the interview questions.
3.3 Semi-‐structured interviews
The second part of the research for this thesis, and the main one, was carried out through interviews. Due to the complex answers that the research questions are looking for, the author saw no other method as an alternative. Since the information that this thesis needed to answer the research questions was impossible to find in already collected/published material, and since surveys or observations would not let the research to go into deep enough or to see changes over time, interviews were chosen to be the principal method.
During the three weeks in field eleven interviews were carried out.65 Nine of the interviews were conducted with leaders for the civil society organizations that have been working with participatory budgeting in Albania. In addition to those nine, one elite interview was made with an expert organization that has been helping the other civil society organizations to improve their work on the tool, as well as one e-mail interview with one public official that has been involved in one of the initiatives. The civil society organizations were seen as the
65 See list of respondents in Appendix II.
primary and main actors to interview, because those were expected to have the deepest knowledge on how successful their initiatives have been in creating social accountability and what factors that has enabled or disabled this work.
The idea was also to get perspectives on the issue from the other actors involved in the initiatives – the local governments. This would have helped to get a more nuanced picture.
During the interviews with the organizations the author asked for names of public officials that have been involved in the processes and that would be possible to contact for information, but the results were low. Either the public officials that earlier were involved had left their positions in the municipality, the public officials did not normally respond to e-mails from the citizens, or the public officials were expected to not tell the full truth in cases where they had negative attitudes towards including the community in the decision-making processes through participatory budgeting. One interview was in the end conducted with one public official through e-mail. This local official worked in a municipality where the initiative had been relatively successful and was the only initiative, out of those examined, that had been initiated by the municipality itself. In addition to this, the idea to make an elite interview with the expert organization was to get their overview perspective on the participatory budgeting initiatives in the country and the context in which they have been implemented.
Due to the fact that the interviews mainly were conducted with representatives from the civil society organizations supported by Olof Palme International Center, two negative aspects might be a consequence of this selection. The first is that that the results of the investigation might be biased; since the analysis almost exclusively is based on the information obtained from the organizations themselves. The second aspect is that the connection of the author to the donor organization could have influenced the answers of the organizations, since they are dependent on the funds from the donor. There are no reasons to expect that the information obtained not is correct, but these aspects were kept in mind during the research. The author tried to counteract these possible consequences through explaining very carefully the purpose of the study and all the time asking for examples to back up the statements of the respondents.
The first contact with the respondents was created through e-mails sent to the ten organizations in which the author explained the purpose of the research and that it was very much appreciated if they could take their time to help by participating in an interview for about one hour. It is important to show that the respondents are a valuable source of information and that their help is highly appreciated. The idea was also to tell them about how much time the interview was planned to take, in order to make it easier for them to plan their time and to not end up rushing through the discussions when conducting the interviews.
Through the e-mail conversations the time, date and place were set for all the ten meetings.
Since the organizations work in different municipalities of Albania the author had to travel around in order to meet them. Either one or two persons from the organizations participated.
During the first part of the interviews the purpose of the study was clearly explained. It felt important to do so both from ethical aspects, but also to explain that the research not was made on the behalf of Olof Palme International Center. It was clarified that the research was
