Quality of governance is a key determinant of sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction. Transparency, responsiveness and accountability have come to become the central tenets of effective governance. In a bid to ensure good governance most of the efforts have been conventionally focused on supply-side reforms to strengthen internal accountability processes. However the same cannot be aid of the demand-side. To effectively tackle the challenges of governance, the supply-side measures have to be complemented by greater public scrutiny and enhanced stakeholder demand. Citizens and their organizations are a critical part of this demand. Strategies to strengthen governance, therefore, have to invest significantly in stimulating, channeling, and building capacity for demand in addition to the capacities built on the supply side. While understanding capacity one needs to understand what Capacity, Capacity Development and Capacity Assessment are.
Civil Society cannot engage meaningfully in governance processes in the absence of certain enabling factors. A key set of conditions like the legal and regulatory framework, political and institutional features, socio-cultural characteristics, and the economic environment in any given context can help in creating an enabling environment for building the capacities of both supply-side and the demand-side stakeholders.
Capacity building is a long-term, continuing process, in which all stakeholders participate. The needs for capacity building are always changing. There are no ready solutions, and any programme must be appropriate for the local situation and organization. Hence the Process of Capacity Building should include steps that ensure assessment, implementation and monitoring that enables development of newer capacity development strategies from time to time.
Capacity building and Social Accountability are interlinked as citizens are rights holders with regard to the public services provided by their government. The community and the beneficiaries empowered to question the government to be more accountable. Accountability mechanisms also have the ability to bind both government and the community with defined rules, rights and responsibilities. Hence capacity building for all the key stakeholders especially the community is important to voice their needs and demands and establish a responsibility of service providers to be accountable. To achieve this, there a number of tools and methods, that can be used to develop the capacities of the stakeholders.
Best Reads
-
-
-
Case Studies
-
-
|
