United Nations

2012 United Nations Public Service Forum United Nations Public Service Day United Nations Public Service Awards Ceremony WORKSHOP 1 Institutions and Leadership Capacities to Innovate and Engage Citizens in Service Delivery

AIDE MEMOIRE

New York, United States of America 26 – 27 June 2012

1. SPONSORSHIP AND PURPOSE The United Nations Public Service Day and Awards Ceremony, and Forum will take place in New York, United States of America from 25 to 27 June 2012. It will be organized by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) Division for Public Administration and Development Management (DPADM). Participants will include heads of government, ministers, senior government officials, mayors, civil society representatives, the academia, and the private sector, as well as representatives of international organizations. The Workshop on “Institutions and Leadership Capacities to Innovate and Engage Citizens in Service Delivery” is organized by the Division for Public Administration and Development Management. 2. BACKGROUND Since 2003, UNDESA celebrates every year, on 23 June, United Nations Public Service Day by organizing the United Nations Public Service Awards Ceremony and a Capacity Development Workshop to recognize and learn from world-wide public organizations who have improved the quality of life of citizens through innovative practices. The General Assembly, in its resolution 57/277, designated 23 June as United Nations Public Service Day for the purpose of celebrating the value and virtue of service to the community at the local, national and global levels, with prizes to be awarded to public sector organizations for contributions made to the cause of enhancing the role, prestige and visibility of public service. The United Nations Public Service Awards (UNPSA) is the most prestigious international recognition of excellence in public service. It rewards the creative achievements and contributions of public service institutions to a more effective and responsive public administration in countries worldwide. Through an annual competition, the United Nations Public Service Awards Programme promotes the role, professionalism and visibility of public service. It encourages exemplary public service and recognizes that democracy and successful governance are built on a competent civil service. In brief, the Awards aim to discover innovations in governance; reward excellence in the public sector; motivate public servants to further promote innovation; enhance professionalism in the public service; raise the image of public service; enhance trust in government; and collect and disseminate successful practices for possible replication. The UNPSA takes into consideration a geographical distribution of five regions. In order to level the playing field for nominations received from countries with varying levels of development and income, the following five regions have been established, including: Africa; Asia and the Pacific; Europe and North America; Latin America and the Caribbean; and Western Asia.

3. CONTEXT The role of effective, capable and responsive governments has never been more important than it is today to the well-being and prosperity of our societies. On the one hand, governments are faced with an increase in citizens’ demands for (a) effective, equitable and citizen-centric services (including security, education, health, justice, shelter, sanitation, etc.); (b) greater levels of transparency and accountability of what 2

government does, especially in times of scarce resources, and (c) greater citizen engagement in public decision-making processes. On the other hand, governments are faced with a rising set of domestic as well as international challenges. At the domestic level, countries must tackle multiple crisis, including the financial crisis; natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, and landslides); food and water shortages, climate change, expansive waves of international migration with over 200 million people living outside of their country of birth, and, in some cases, even with intraState conflict. At the international level, governments must deal effectively with globalization processes, including their impact on domestic markets whose local industries more often than not are not resilient enough to survive competition. In addition, Governments are also challenged with issues related to international peace and security. The multiple demands and challenges that national governments face at present call for a revitalized public administration that is capable of designing and implementing innovative strategies, practices and tools that enable them to transform challenges into opportunities for socio-economic development. The quest for a more innovative and responsive public administration is also critical for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. In fact, with the need for the world to achieve the commitments made by its leaders in the Millennium Declaration, the 2005 World Summit and many other global and regional conferences, it has attained a level of urgency. In the Declaration of the United Nations Millennium Summit, Member States agreed that the Millennium Development Goals would not be achieved without effective, transparent, accountable, participatory and citizen-centric public governance. While development is often envisaged in terms of grandiose projects, in practical terms, it is actually realizing incremental improvements in normal day-to-day life necessities and provision of vital services such as health, education, social services, transport, clean water and sanitation, energy, and agricultural extension closer to citizens. Achievement of MDGs requires sustained improvements in public administration. It is however a mission too big to be undertaken only at a central level. Given the diverse needs of localities within regions and even within countries, it has become increasingly evident that decentralized governance is a key catalyst for improved public administration and efficient service delivery. Local governments provide the most feasible means of conceiving, implementing, monitoring and evaluating poverty reduction interventions without risking the mismatches between development programmes and the actual needs on the ground which is characteristic with centrallydesigned development projects. This is because it is hoped that the process of decentralization facilitates greater participation of communities in problems’ analysis, needs identification, projects’ planning and implementation. In addition to responsive development interventions, there are obvious benefits of increased ownership and buy-in among citizens and local institutions. In many countries that have decentralized, most of the areas in which the MDGs and their targets have been set are mandates of local governments, for example primary education, primary health care, sanitation, access to potable water and other targets. It is thus critical that the search for solutions on institutional and leadership capacity building focuses on both national and local levels of governance.

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Notwithstanding the important and sometimes decisive role played by local governments in attaining MDGs, in many instances, efforts of strengthening capacity are focused at central government levels, leaving local governments in a precarious position and seriously impairing their ability to deliver effectively on their mandates. More often than not, they do not possess the necessary financial, administrative and leadership capacities to effectively address such problems. The under-funded and limited autonomy state that some local governments face is an attribute that fuels perpetual lack of capacity to deal with the many challenges at local level. Transferring functions without the necessary resources is at best counter-productive. Consequently, in many developing countries public administration capacity in local governments is generally very weak and this poses a threat to the achievement of the MDGs. Strengthening leadership capacities at both national and local levels is a prerequisite for creating an environment where innovation thrives. It is important that government officials, particularly at local level, have the skills and expertise to harness ideas from diverse communities for innovation. This is so because local governments are at the contact point between government and the people. The key question that needs to be answered is what does it take to create developmental and effective public institutions? This question can only be answered through dialogue on the prerequisites for effective governments and determining what would be the right mix of financial, human and administrative capacities in general and informed by national and local dynamics, what would work for different scenarios. Governance and leadership capacity cannot be developed in the absence of a supportive institutional infrastructure. Effective institutional arrangements can largely be informed by the needs of the communities at local level and limiting the dialogue of institutional arrangements to a central level would inevitably result in a misfit between the design of public services and the de facto service requirements. An institutional development approach that is embedded on local requirements provides governments with an opportunity to practice what can work and what cannot, an excellent chance to develop and implement successful development models informed by lessons learnt. At local level, it is always possible to find people with integrative leadership ability, but for them to fully develop their administrative/managerial, entrepreneurial and operative capability they need to be put in institutional structures that provide opportunity for such abilities to be put into action. Such structures can be provided by local councils, committees and other management structures especially if decentralization takes the form of devolution. Among the challenges requiring visionary leadership especially at local level are those triggered by the growing and insistent demands for popular participation and good governance, for the accommodation of ethnic, cultural, gender, political, economic, and religious diversity. Leaders cannot design and implement strategies on their own, nor is it desirable that they do so. Leaders that are not particularly aware of and sensitive to issues of diversity will not only miss the opportunities provided by the socio-cultural and even politico-economic diversity, but will also fail to pay particular attention to and creatively mediate the demands that are created by this diversity. Such a failure would fuel unnecessary conflict. Most conflicts start at local level and their disastrous effects are felt mostly by local communities. Embracing and harnessing diversity for development starts with acknowledging the fact that everybody has a role to play in development. Experience over time has shown that no

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matter how much one wants to help local communities to develop, the task is by far easier when the communities participate in the whole process of planning, programming, prioritising, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of their development. Lack of participation and inclusiveness will reduce chances for governments to be effective and the worst but very probable and common scenario is undertaking development projects that do not address the needs of the local communities. Participation is not getting local communities to rubber stamp preconceived ideas by public officials, neither can it be considered participation when public officials merely inform communities of planned projects that communities took no part in visioning. It is not just about meeting people’s needs, it is about creating an environment in which people can address their needs. Governments can therefore not afford to second guess what their communities need. The main challenge is how to ensure that governments have the capacity to facilitate participation at all levels. A popular slogan by activists for the rights of people with disabilities in South Africa sums it up well, “nothing about us, without us”. Through decentralized governance structures, communities can play an active role in democracy and setting development agendas that are responsive to their needs. They can shape service provision through participating and influencing decisions on the type, quality and mix of services they desire and can afford. Leading with integrity, protecting and advancing the public interest ahead of individual interest; the maintenance of public confidence in the integrity and objectivity of governance; openness to public inspection; transparency and accountability; and the ceaseless concern to fight against poverty at local level are critical in the struggle for development. Poverty reduction has to remain one of the central goals of local level public administration. Leading people out of poverty is a virtue that all leaders should focus as improving living standards for the poor will not happen by chance. Governments have to consciously make pro-poor policy choices and consistently implement them as the impact on poverty cannot be reduced by mere declaration of such policies. The celebrations of the United Nations Public Service Day and Africa Public Service Day 2012, marking the 10th anniversary of the United Nations Public Service Awards program come at a time that citizens the world over are demanding service delivery and accountability from governments. It is a time where citizens have become accustomed to impressive development programmes, which have regrettably remained impressive on paper impressive on paper for the most part. All civil servants should ask themselves what they can do better to change the status quo. It is a time that requires governments to go beyond the usual rhetoric and deliver on the promises to ensure that citizens have access at the very least to basic services and they are out of abject poverty. Given the vast global resources, no citizen should have to live in the unstable and poverty-ridden environment that most citizens find themselves in today. In line with the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations is dedicated to promoting the exchange of experiences, ideas and best practices concerning innovations in governance and public administration in order to contribute to social and economic development. The General Assembly itself has reiterated, in resolution 57/277 that particular emphasis should be given to the exchange of experience related to the role of public administration in the implementation of

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internationally agreed goals, including those contained in the Millennium Declaration. In resolution 50/225, it also underlined the importance of enhancing international cooperation in the field of public administration, including SouthSouth and interregional cooperation.

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OBJECTIVES

The workshop aims at uncovering emerging trends, policies and strategies, practices and lessons learned related to the leveraging citizens’ knowledge and ideas for institutional development of service delivery in a number of areas, including health, education, land management and water and sanitation. It is expected that the capacity development workshop will be highly interactive and participatory since all participants will be given the opportunity to think analytically about the cases being presented and bring in their own experience and expertise of what helps countries strengthen capacities in local level public administration in the aforementioned areas of concentration. The ultimate goal of this event is to build a shared understanding among all governance actors of what policies and strategies, practices and tools Member States can adopt to make public administration at local level more effective, transparent, accountable, participatory and citizen-centric with a view to promoting greater social and economic development. The event will end with a plenary session where the coordinators of each working group will present to the larger audience a set of recommendations on the way forward. The workshop will provide participants an opportunity to:

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Discuss approaches of attaining true participation of citizens in institutional development and service delivery

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Present and discuss strategies and trends to promote innovation in service delivery;

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Share successful experiences in strengthening public service delivery capacity through the presentation of the 2012 UNPSA winners and finalists;

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Discuss what tools are available to strengthen public service delivery capacity, with a particular focus not only on available policy options, but also on how to build capacity at the local level.

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Strengthen North-South and South-South cooperation to enhance public sector capacity building in the above-mentioned areas.

EXPECTED RESULTS

The event is expected to achieve the following goals: •

Shared knowledge of most recent innovations and trends in public administration 6

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Consensus on key success factors in promoting an effective, transparent, accountable, participatory and citizen-centric public administration at local level through the discussion of key recommendations and policy options.

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Increased levels of knowledge and awareness of innovative practices to prevent and combat corruption, and deliver quality services equitably.

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Identified possible policy options for preventing and combating corruption in public service

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Enhanced cooperation among countries that are undertaking efforts to innovate their public administration institutions, structures, mechanisms and processes by establishing on UNPAN a virtual network of government officials and experts working in the area;

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Development of manuals and guidelines on how to strengthen the capacity of public administration in the four areas of focus.

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THEMES FOR DISCUSSION

One of the most important objectives of governments is the delivery of public services and goods or providing access to them. Of even more significance is how service delivery is attuned to the needs of citizens. This workshop will therefore focus on policies and strategies, innovative practices and lessons learned on how to promote participation and innovation in public service delivery as well as setting up appropriate institutional arrangements. Experts will be invited to provide an overview of the strategies and trends in these two sub-thematic areas whereas selected government officials will present successful experiences from their own countries. Ample time will also be dedicated to discussing policy options and tools for capacity development in the area of public service delivery. Participants will discuss the following issues with respect to each identified area: (a) What are the current challenges and trends in service delivery systems? (b) What types of service delivery systems (with a particular focus on health, education, housing and sanitation) are prevalent in the various regions of the world? (c) How can citizens be more involved in local governance and innovation? (d) How can service delivery be improved in terms of: •

Quality - High quality service delivery may be manifested in - but are not limited to - the availability of government services at times and in ways that are more convenient to the public, speedy processing of applications or claims, reduction in the amount of paperwork and other

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• • •

activities citizens must perform in order to demonstrate compliance or clearly written government regulations. Access, such as the expansion of the coverage or enhancement of the quality service delivery, Cost-effectiveness – What are the most economic models for delivering quality services to the citizens? Citizen-centric – What mechanisms have proven to succeed in engaging citizens in policy decision-making processes and in the delivery of services?

(d) What are the best practices in delivering services to achieve the MDGs? 6. ORGANIZATION 6.1.

Participants

Participants will include ministers and other senior policy makers, experts, practitioners, and representatives of international, regional and sub-regional institutions, academia and the private sector. Close to 100 participants are expected to participate in this workshop. 6.2.

Official languages

The official languages of the meeting will be English. 6.3.

Electronic networking

All the documents of the meeting will be posted on the Online Global Network on Public Administration and Finance (http://www.unpan.org/unpsa) 6.4.

Format of the Meeting

The first day and half of the meeting will be devoted to the capacity development workshop. A concise statement of key policy messages will be communicated to the Wrap-up Plenary Session. Recommendations from the workshop will be incorporated into the Final Declaration of the United Nations Public Service Day. In addition, a short summary of the workshop discussions (7-10 pages) will be prepared by the workshop organizers and incorporated into the overall final report for the 2012 United Nations Public Service Day and Forum.

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