This guide is cross-posted from Busara as part of MIT GOV/LAB’s practitioner-in-residence program, see the original post online.
How can citizens’ voices enhance governance? Reflections from applied behavioral science research on what motivates citizen participation in East Africa
Overview
As Busara, we have had the privilege of bearing witness to how the public and social sectors have been re-imagining their work through behavioral science while also playing an active role in driving and shaping this evolution. With this groundwork, we provide a set of reflections from conducting our CSO research programs, which has taken us on a winding journey close to a decade and, as with all meaningful research endeavors, generated more questions than answers. The reflections provided in this groundwork are not meant to provide definitive conceptual conclusions or insights regarding how to motivate citizen engagement in East Africa. Instead, they are organized around the lessons Busara has learned. In sharing these reflections, we hope to provide civil society practitioners, applied researchers, funders, and policymakers with insights on the valuable ways to think about understanding, evaluating, and applying audience behaviors in bottom-up governance and citizen engagement interventions in non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Developed) contexts.
Thematic Areas
We understand that governance systems are complex. However, by combining a behavioral systems approach, we can tap into the opportunities that motivate engagement to understand how decisions are made. Using this framework, we can build interventions that focus on the identified behavioral factors such as social norms, political efficacy, access to information, or trust in government.
Executive Summary
Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) are crucial vehicles to deepening governance, accountability, and inclusive development. They tend to address issues such as human and community rights, natural resource management, gender inclusivity, and the rights of persons with disabilities, among others. Primarily, they do this through community engagement, community empowerment, and/or grassroots organizing. Through years of collaboration with CSOs, we observed little experimentation and innovation on methods that best incorporate behavioral approaches by CSOs, relative to practitioners in the private sector. This can be attributed to a general limited awareness of resources and methods available for experimentation and innovation and a perception that behavioral science is too technical, academic, or complex for their organizations. Additionally, CSOs face particular pressures, incentives, and competing priorities, such as relationships with their communities, peer organizations, policymakers, and funders.
As Busara, we have had the privilege of bearing witness to how the public and social sectors have been re-imagining their work through behavioral science while also playing an active role in driving and shaping this evolution. With this groundwork, we provide a set of reflections from conducting our CSO research programs, which has taken us on a winding journey close to a decade and, as with all meaningful research endeavors, generated more questions than answers. The reflections provided in this groundwork are not meant to provide definitive conceptual conclusions or insights regarding how to motivate citizen engagement in East Africa. Instead, they are organized around the lessons Busara has learned. In sharing these reflections, we hope to provide civil society practitioners, applied researchers, funders, and policymakers with insights on the valuable ways to think about understanding, evaluating, and applying audience behaviors in bottom-up governance and citizen engagement interventions in non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Developed) contexts.
Some initial learnings point towards expanding the meaning of civic engagement by paying attention to context. This is especially important within East Africa where social norms define individual behaviors. Through close collaboration with CSOs, we learnt that there is no simple way to motivate engagement. However, self agency plays a crucial role in engagement, but there is a constant need for incentives to foster meaningful engagement among citizens. We further found that community meetings are the most prominent form of engagement among CSOs. They are the initial points of entry into a community. Making them more effective should therefore be a top priority to encourage meaningful engagement with community members. For instance, by making them more inclusive and paying attention to the needs of the members.
We have also found that a rights based approach in community engagement is ineffective. We think that CSOs would make citizens more engaged if they showed them how their personal goals and struggles are linked to their communities. That means building effective coalition and advocacy networks in the grassroots. This is crucial to our work as we have found that group agency can be a powerful motivator of citizen engagement. More citizens are willing to engage when they see their peers doing the same. Consequently, group based interventions that target political agency can be useful tools to sustain engagement.
We understand that governance systems are complex. However, by combining a behavioral systems approach, we can tap into the opportunities that motivate engagement to understand how decisions are made. Using this framework, we can build interventions that focus on the identified behavioral factors such as social norms, political efficacy, access to information, or trust in government.
Finally, we looked at the current funding landscape and found that it may foster or hinder collaboration and experimentation among CSOs. Due to the limited and unpredictable funding cycles, CSOs may be less willing to apply new tools and focus on completing existing projects. They may also find themselves competing for funding from the same funders; which could impact their willingness to share resources. We believe that these limitations can be tackled through a dynamic funding process that advances institutional development to propel research innovation, and testing of new methodologies that will potentially tackle the complex social, political, and economic challenges in the region.
Read the full piece online at Busara.
Photo by Ana Flávia on Unsplash.