Empowering Civil Society Groups to Promote Social Accountability

The project was built around eight intensive visits by members of the grantee’s project team. This approach, which excluded partnership in project implementation with a Papua-based organization, and which made no allowance for continuity between team visits, resulted in certain inefficiencies.

A small number of activities, including a national seminar in Jakarta, a study-tour to Australia, added little to project results and diverted resources which might have been better used elsewhere.

Most activities were planned logically to build awareness and understanding of social accountability on the part of Papuan CSOs, local officials and elected representatives, along with local academics and journalists. However, while individual activities were technically sound and well-received, the project lacked a clearly-defined strategy putting in place sustainable knowledge and skills. Capacity cannot be built through lectures and question-and-answer sessions alone. Beyond this, it will be necessary to provide trainees or learners with opportunities to put what has been learned into practice and adapt new knowledge to the local context.

The setting up of a CSO Forum to bring civil society organizations together and to provide an arena for dialogue between government and civil society was widely welcomed. Unfortunately, no effort was made to formalize the organization, structure and leadership of the Forum. It existed only when the project team was present in Jayapura, Indonesia, and organized an event. Once the project finished, the Forum ceased to exist.

As a result of the limited scope of initial stakeholder consultations, the experience of existing CSO networks in Papua, Indonesia, was not taken into account.

A weakness in the project was the over-estimation by the Jakarta-based project team of the level of interest of Papuan decision-makers in reform. The project also failed to understand that middle-level officials in Indonesia could not make commitments on behalf of the government.

A number of government officials from Papua, Indonesia, indicated their desire to do more in utilizing the Citizen Reporting Cards beyond the project, but there has been no follow up. Similarly, none of the members of the CSO Forum have taken the initiative to meet, or to establish the organization on a more formal basis.

The project worked constructively to draw attention to deficiencies in governance in Papua, and contributed to building a broader awareness of social accountability and what it entails. There was potential for the project to have a catalytic effect. As the grantee represented a highly-credible, mainstream Indonesian policy research institution, it would have been in a position to facilitate dialogue between government and civil society in Papua in a way that locally-based organizations might find more difficult. Had it managed to secure additional funding, lessons learned from the project could have represented a beginning rather than an end.

The project introduced a tool called Citizen Report Cards (CRC) and trained local education officials, teachers and CSO members, on their use including a practical planning exercise leading to an educational pilot study to select indicators and assess results. Therefore the methodology was well-understood by participants.