Citizen monitoring promotes informed and inclusive forest governance in Liberia

Global forest loss depends on decisions made in the rural, often poor communities living beside the Earth’s remaining forests. Governance problems in these forest-edge communities contribute to rapid deforestation and household vulnerability. In coordination with experimental studies in 5 other countries, we evaluate a program that recruits, trains, and deploys citizens to monitor communal forestland in 60 communities in rural Liberia. The year-long intervention is designed to promote more informed and inclusive resource governance, so that that citizens’ preferences (and not just leaders’ interests) are reflected in forest management. In our control communities, households are uninformed and disengaged; leaders’ authority is unchecked. The program both engages and mobilizes community members: households are better informed and participate more in the design and enforcement of rules around forest use. They also report receiving more material benefits from outside investors’ activities in their community forests. The chiefs who lead these communities attest to strengthened accountability. Using both on-the-ground environmental assessments and remotely sensed data, we find no effects on forest use or deforestation. Households do not favor more conservation, and, thus, more inclusive management does not reduce forest use. Conservation likely requires compensating community members for foregoing forest use; citizen monitoring, we argue, could ensure that such schemes enjoy popular support and do not just benefit local elites.

Citizen monitoring of waterways decreases pollution in China by supporting government action and oversight

Water pollution is a persistent problem in China, in part, because local governments fail to implement water quality standards set by national and provincial authorities. These higher authorities often lack regular information about the immediate and long-term achievement of remediation targets. Accordingly, central authorities have encouraged nongovernmental organizations to monitor local governments’ remediation efforts. This study examines whether nongovernmental monitoring of urban waterways improves water quality by facilitating oversight of local governments or instigating public action for remediation. We randomly assigned urban waterways in Jiangsu province previously identified for remediation to be monitored by a partner nongovernmental organization for 15 mo. We further randomized whether the resulting information was disseminated to local and provincial governments, the public, or both. Disseminating results from monitoring to local and provincial governments improved water quality, but disseminating results to the public did not have detectable effects on water quality or residents’ pursuit of remediation through official and volunteer channels. Monitoring can improve resource management when it provides information that makes local resource managers accountable to higher authorities.

Combining bottom-up monitoring and top-down accountability: A field experiment on managing corruption in Uganda

Citizen monitoring of government performance is often ineffective at improving performance, perhaps because information from monitoring does not make it far enough up in the chain of bureaucracy where the authority to punish public mismanagement rests. In a field experiment, we test whether delivering regular, officially certified reports derived from citizen monitoring and describing specific problems with the implementation of public projects to high-level bureaucrats charged with overseeing the projects improved their delivery. We do not find evidence that this treatment improved the delivery of public projects. Follow-up interviews revealed that the targeted officials seemed to avoid knowledge of the monitoring, perhaps to avoid taking on the responsibility that would come from such knowledge. However, the treatment also provided information to citizens about what they should expect from local governments, which instigated several direct complaints that the targeted officials did not ignore. Based on this alternative channel, which we did not anticipate, we conclude that citizen monitoring must be deployed in ways that make knowledge of problems undeniable for authorities who have a responsibility to address them.

Politics, technology, and accountability: The Transparency Façade of Open Government Data Reforms in Paraguay

Governments have adopted the rhetoric of promoting transparency, citizen engagement, and accountability through technological innovation. The provision of open government data has been encouraged as a foundational reform in that direction. This study argues that, in Paraguay’s education sector, these reforms were never capable of matching said rhetoric. Using a case study design, the research shows that the stated goals of intuitively simplifying information to facilitate citizen monitoring of funds for education infrastructure were never realistically attempted by the government. It will advocate the relevance of considering the relationship between politics, accountability, and technology to uncover transparency façades.

SUPPORT TO CITIZEN RADIATION MONITORING OF RADIOACTIVITY IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC—PROJECT RAMESIS

Project ‘RAMESIS’, solved by SURO+UTEF+NUVIA, is aimed at the improvement of population safety through supporting Citizen Monitoring in Czechia. Radiation monitoring system at the level of institutions, schools and citizens will be developed and implemented, covering equipment for both fixed-site and mobile monitoring using simple-designed and easy-to-operate detectors, enabling their usage by public and mass-production at acceptable price. The instrumentation includes central application for reception, storage, administration and publication of monitoring results analyzed and presented on web-portal, tools for user’s local online and offline data visualization on a map background, and web portal providing training and informational materials for understanding radiation problems. The system will be implemented in selected institutions and schools, initial sets of detectors are distributed free of charge among schools, institutions and the public. This article describes the technical part of the project, solved in the framework of Ministry of Interior-founded security research ID VI20152019028.

RAMESIS PROJECT: COLLABORATION WITH SCHOOLS AND INSTITUTIONS ON THE BUILDING OF A CITIZEN MONITORING NETWORK

In a radiation emergency situation, including its post-emergency recovery phase, substantial needs for radiation measurements can be expected. In such situations, responsible authorities might not be able to satisfy all requirements for measurement. Therefore, involvement of local communities is desirable. Citizen radiation monitoring networks, established in advance as citizen science structures, can serve as a knowledge basis for later participation in self-help protective actions. The article describes the progress of citizen radiation monitoring networks being established in the Czech Republic in the frame of Radiation Monitoring Network for Institutions and Schools project. During the project launch, it has been shown that conducting radiation measurements and results processing have educational effect on students and enhance awareness among interested groups in the field of radiation protection and radiation in general. This article describes the socially oriented part of the project.

Mistrust and social hierarchies as blind spots of ICT4D projects

Information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) are seen to have great potential for boosting democratization processes all over the world by giving people access to information and thereby empowering them to demand more accountability and transparency of authorities. Based on ethnographic research in Togo and Rwanda on an SMS-based citizen monitoring and evaluation system, this article argues that focusing on access to information is too narrow a view. We show that it is crucial to take into account the respective socio-political backgrounds, such as levels of mistrust or existing social hierarchies. In this context, mobile phone usage has rather varied and ambiguous meanings here. These dynamics can pose a challenge to the successful implementation of ICT4D projects aimed at political empowerment. By addressing these often overlooked issues, we offer explanations for the gap between ICT4D assumptions and people’s lifeworlds in Togo and Rwanda.

CULTURAL PARTICIPATION IN THE MAIN COLOMBIAN CITIES, 2008-2015

This paper aims to explain the evolution of the cultural participation in Colombia between 2018 and 2015, and to empirically analyse the factors associated to the decision of participating in cultural activities in the five main cities during this period. In Bogota, Cali, Medellin, Barranquilla and Cartagena, half of the urban population resides. The effects of a set of individual variables, household and context are evaluated, exploring alongside the traditional determinants, a set of new variables such as the kind of education that children receive, the poverty situation and others concerning the habitat, the social capital and macroeconomic ones. Microdata from households from the Quality of Life Survey – from programmes of citizen monitoring- are used, with which a binomial model is estimated. The results highlight the importance of including the context variables so as to widen the knowledge of the individual decisions of participation.