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Kerstiru

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ICT4D & DevCom strategist, Access to Information and free expression advocate, community media passionate

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Transparency and Accountability

Is It Time for a New Paradigm for "Citizen Engagement"? The Role of Context and What the Evidence Tells Us. The meteoric rise of "citizen engagement" Almost all development agencies promote some form of citizen engagement and accountability, often framed as 'voice', 'demand-side governance', 'demand for good governance' or 'social accountability'.

Is It Time for a New Paradigm for "Citizen Engagement"? The Role of Context and What the Evidence Tells Us

The current World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, recently put it that, "citizen voice can be pivotal in providing the demand-side pressure on government, service providers, and organizations such as the World Bank that is needed to encourage full and swift response to citizen needs". There has, in turn, been a mushrooming of useful operational guidance on different "tools" for social accountability - i.e. steps, inputs and methodologies - that guide discrete interventions, ranging from citizen score cards to participatory expenditure tracking. One might, however, be forgiven for thinking that some of the debates on citizen engagement need an injection of realism; especially as contextual factors can make or break a "tool's" implementation.

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25 Countries in the Same Room: The OKFestival Community Summit. Photo by Heather Leson, CC-BY-SA Two weeks back, over 1,000 people gathered in Berlin to co-create the future of the open knowledge movement.

25 Countries in the Same Room: The OKFestival Community Summit

Even before OKFestival had officially kicked off, over 50 people from over 25 countries piled into a crowded, hot room on a glorious Berlin afternoon, to work through the pressing issues, opportunities and challenges facing the Open Knowledge community. Over the course of three hours we talked about how to develop better peer to peer mentorship across our global network, how to ensure the sustainability of emerging local groups and Chapters & took a close look at what exactly we are – are we a movement, are we an organisation, are we a community? These questions could never be completely answered in one three hour session but we did make some exceptional progress and observed quite a few common themes emerging – themes also to be witnessed over the course of the following festival as well!

Sharing Knowledge Photo by Christian Villum, CC-BY-SA. Dave Prescott: What Does a Collaborative Society Look Like? By Dave Prescott, The Partnering Initiative As part of the roadmap for systematically engaging business as a partner in development, we would like to set out a vision for a collaborative society that is so compelling that it acts as an inexorable draw for organisations to aspire to.

Dave Prescott: What Does a Collaborative Society Look Like?

There is value in taking a step back from the nuts and bolts of partnership and reminding ourselves what it is that we are trying to achieve over the long term. We envisage a collaborative society as one where a culture of partnership has been internalised to the extent that it is woven into the social fabric. Interdependence has become mainstreamed. There is general understanding of the situations and contexts where partnerships are likely to be effective.

For example, partnerships are more likely to succeed where the subject is of strategic importance, such as energy, water and agriculture. The result of this new cultural landscape is a major leap forward in development impacts. The Engagement Pyramid: Six Levels of Connecting People and Social Change. What does it mean to "engage people"?

The Engagement Pyramid: Six Levels of Connecting People and Social Change

Gideon Rosenblatt talks through six different levels of engagement people can have with your organization, in an article reprinted from Groundwire. Reprinted with permission from Groundwire. You can read more about this organization at groundwire.org, where you'll also find the article "What is your Engagement Superpower? " One of the things Groundwire does is help environmental organizations build better strategies for engaging people. You can learn more about why they think civic engagement is so critical to building a sustainable society from their Theory of Change, but the short answer is that it builds power – power that influences decisions that shape society and impact the planet. Civic engagement can mean a lot of different things though – from the casual forwarding of a friend’s email to deep involvement on a board of directors.

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