Six main insights, generated in the process of designing, executing, and evaluating Tavarandu, a prototype of a participatory governance portfolio developed in the Department of Itapúa, Paraguay, consisting of a training course in participatory innovation methodologies for teams of officials of 15 municipal governments (Tava’apo), two citizen laboratories designed to strengthen participatory governance (Hechakuaa), and a civic technology bootcamp to develop tools for digital citizen participation, included: 1. The surprising degree of interest on very short notice among municipal employees. Despite having less than 6 months to finish designing, operationalize, and implement Tava’apo, we were able to fill all the slots with teams from different municipalities. There is a very strong demand for these kinds of training opportunities outside of the country’s capital and at the local level. The feedback from participants confirmed how much they valued the opportunities. With a longer implementation timeline, it should be possible to mobilize more participation and greater commitment. 2. In person, as opposed to virtual interaction, was a much more effective format for the training course of Tava’apo in this case. One unanticipated benefit of the in-person training was the interaction among officials from different municipalities that were able to identify the sets of challenges and barriers for effective participatory governance that were common across municipalities. These observations created an impulse towered collaboration or coordination in requests for technical support from central government agencies and for continued interaction. In future iterations of the program this collaborative aspect could be fully integrated, made more explicit, and expanded. 3. The collective intelligence component of the training course was a key link between the participatory governance elements of the curriculum and the public innovation components. The participants of Tava’apo understood that “we think better all together” and that diversity or multiplicity of thinking creates more innovation. 4. The training must be accompanied by mentoring for practical implementation. There were lots of inquiries from the participants about whether funds would be available to implement the proposals they were developing as exercises for the training program. To generate real changes in governance, new iterations of the portfolio should fully integrate the participatory governance, innovation, and civic technology components and add a “social communication” component to the program as well. 5. For the citizens laboratories (Hechakuaa), securing political support of local leaders is key for achieving implementation of the community cocreated interventions or work plans. We had to delay implementation of even relatively small interventions in order to consolidate political support. We also observed that this is easier when consolidated organizations with long histories of organizing and local social and political activity are involved in the citizens laboratory. 6. For future iterations of the program, we have identified other specific improvement areas that need attention: (1) the need to develop the 3 components of the portfolio one after the other, to improve the feedback loop between them; (2) the need to strengthen and articulate the emerging network of public innovators that could arise from the program, at their local level; (3) the need to develop a mapping and sensemaking process better understand the specific context of each municipality, and inform the design and content of the program based on the insights we can gather from this process; (4) the need to integrate a component of strategic communication and public relations to manage expectations from participants and to make sure key actors in local governments are involved and aware of all the activities of the program.

In the news: "El programa Tavarandu presenta hitos alcanzados en el departamento de Itapúa"

In the news: "Comité de productoras promueve el consumo responsable de yerba mate orgánica"

Launching Blogpost

Project's Website

The most important bottleneck we faced had to do with the execution times associated with the source of funding utilized for the initiative. We utilized TRAC 2 funds provided by RBLAC as part of a call for proposals to strengthen the strategic enablers of the UNDP strategic plan, in our case strategic innovation and digitalization. These funds, 60k, were allocated in July 2022 and had to be spent within the calendar year. For the ambition and scale of the interventions, it was also a very tight budget. We were able to recruit an extremely capable set of organizations and consultants for project design and implementation, as well as recruit more than 100 participants and organize virtual and in-person logistics for all of the activities. A crucial variable for managing and overcoming this bottleneck was identifying an implementing partner with a great deal of previous experience implementing training programs with municipal officials. The NGOs we worked with already had a training curriculum, an experienced staff, educational and logistical methodologies, and experience in communication and promotion of their initiatives.  With a longer implementation timeline and more generous resources, we would have been able to greatly strengthen the practical application of the participatory methods the program taught and integrate more tools for impact evaluation to learn from the experience. 

Because our activities for this action learning plan consisted of a prototype of a portfolio of interventions, the main source of data used to design and implement the prototype were interviews with key actors and a review of literature and documentation. The training course itself made use of collective intelligence, design thinking, issue mapping, and other tools because it sought to teach and incentivize the adoption of these tools in the management of the participating municipalities.  Moreover, to evaluate how much of the content and methods taught during training sessions were picked up by participants, we designed a proof-of-concept kind of exercise in which each participant had to create a proposal of steps to follow in order to address a local issue. This was done before and after the course in order to observe (1) how much of the new participatory tools and methods they included at the end, and (2) in what ways were they including and valuating these tools. We are still in the process of analyzing this exercise, and we are planning to run some heuristic evaluation strategies to see also (3) how others perceived the added value on after-training proposals.

The training course itself made use of collective intelligence, design thinking, issue mapping, and other tools because it sought to teach and incentivize the adoption of these tools in the management of the participating municipalities. 

We partnered with three NGOs for the three different components of the program: Alma Civica implemented the training course with municipal officials, Cultura y Participacion implemented a citizens’ laboratories in two municipalities with public, private, and civil society participation, and Girls Code implemented the civic technology bootcamp and hackathon.    

Members of the National University of Itapúa and the Autonomous University of Encarnacion participated in the citizens laboratory in Encarnacion. The Autonomous University of Encarnacion was a host and partner for the civic technology bootcamp and hackathon. We also made an alliance with the National University of Itapúa to carry out a university extension project that promotes the participation of students of Computer Science in the bootcamp and hackathon.

Oñoiru, a cooperative organization of yerba mate producers, was the main partner for one of the citizen’s laboratories. They hosted a cocreation session which resulted in an initiative to improve the marketing and promotion of fairtrade yerba mate. 

Employees from 12 municipalities in the Department of Itapúa participated in the training course, and the municipality of Encarnacion was the main ally for one of the citizens laboratories, which focused on the problems of unemployment t and poor access to transport of youth in communities displaced by largescale infrastructure projects linked to the flooding of the reservoir of the hydroelectric dam near the city. The laboratory designed a community fair as an intervention aimed at recovering historic memory of the displaced communities as a first step to recovering from the experience of physical and social displacement. 

The municipal governments were unusual partners in two ways. First, much of UNDPs work in Paraguay is at the national ministerial level. Second, at both the national and municipal level, UNDP projects tend to extend public sector-capacities through hiring temporary project consultants, rather than training career civil servants that are functionaries of their institutions.  

This project brought together a very diverse set of actors from different institutions, geographies and experiences. Our civil society partners consisted of an NGO specialized and committed to improving citizen participation, another NGO in strengthening local governance, accountability, and the quality of political leadership, a third NGO committed to creating opportunities for women in the tech industries. Taking these Asuncion-based organization to the country’s interior generated a lot of momentum and enthusiasm for the local actors that often feel quite distant from the opportunities of the capital or international organizations and isolated from one another. The experience really highlighted the tremendous opportunities for accelerating development at the local level by investing in local government.