Challenge statement
Challenge type: If you are working on multiple challenges, please indicate if this is your "big bet" or "exploratory" challenge.
Please note: we ask you to only submit a maximum of 3 challenges - 1x Big Bet, 2x Exploratory. Each challenge must be submitted individually.
EXPLORATORY
Challenge statement: What is your challenge? (Please answer in specific terms: "Our challenge is that...”.)
Our challenge is to develop and practice capacities for public innovation applied to the development and adoption of new and better forms of democratic participatory governance that are deeply committed and informed by effective governance principles. How do we develop these capacities and how do we disseminate them across a network of local government and communities. How do we measure and learn to what extend they help accelerating and localizing the achievement of SDGs?
Background: What is the history of your challenge? What is causing or driving it? Who is involved? How does the current situation look like? What undesired effects does it produce?
Participatory institutions are incipient and underdeveloped in Paraguay. The country maintains high levels of administrative and fiscal centralization. The National Constitution establishes the concept of participatory democracy in its first article, but few regulations exists to enact mechanisms that guarantee its practice. In local governments, the new Municipal Organic Law, from 2010, establishes some mechanisms for participatory democracy at the leve lof local governments, such as Neighborhood Comissions, Communal Boards and Municipal Development Councils. However, barriers for their effective put in practice remain high, including scarse financial, administrative, economic and management capabilities of local governments to promote sustained citizen engagement. As a result, most participatory processes are symbolic or consultative in nature, institutional, and political contexts are riddled with barriers to meaningful and binding citizen participation.
Political and partisan polarization prevent effective planning in most public policy areas, and so does the limited data there is about citizen's needs and policy preferences. Despite these barriers, collective action and community participation take place in both rural and urban areas. Our own sensing and exploration of this challenge has produced evidence on the role of participatory governance (particularly, around community commons) in reducing economic vulnerabilities, aided by social capital (particularly, its linking forms).
Additionally, community collective action is a staple of vulnerability mitigation across all local communities in Paraguay and has played a significant positive role during the pandemic. Another main finding of our national survey on Social Capital is that higher institutional trust can increase participation in the management of community commons, which in turn, decreases economic vulnerability. However, the increment of institutional trust reduces the amount of mutual-aid collective action organized by individuals within the territories. This tension between participation and institutional trust in Paraguay, and the way they are linked to social capital, particularly, linking social capital, is part of the phenomenon around which we are building a portfolio of both exploration and experimentation, where citizen participation sometimes acts as an enabling factor for other interventions, and is sometimes the focus of the intervention itself. Finally, there is a lot of empirical evidence about the benefits of investing in citizen participation: from improving civic skills and knowledge, to strengthening organized civil society and improving government decision-making practices.
Quantitative evidence: What (official) data sources do you have on this challenge that better exemplifies the importance and urgency of this frontier challenge? You can add text, a link, or a picture.
Several of our learning loops during the first two years of the lab have created a portfolio of learning about participation, social capital and trust. Throughout our cycles, we have used official data from the National Statistics Institute, unofficial data collected by citizens (e.g., AyudaPY), and new original and systematic data generated or facilitated by our lab (e.g., a national survey on social capital, the impact evaluation of a recycling pilot that has community trust as one of its pillars, the participatory mapping initiatives such as Wendá, treasury data to characterize municipal governments in terms of their financial, management and economic capabilities and contexts). All these initiatives have generated useful quantitative data that links to this challenge. Below, some links where we refer to this data.
Qualitative evidence: What weak signals have you recently spotted that characterizes its urgency? Please provide qualitative information that better exemplifies the importance and urgency of this frontier challenge. You can add text, a link, or a picture.
Many of our activities within this topic have generated qualitative observations and insights about why more and better participatory governance can unlock sustainable development. On one hand, (1) we designed and facilitated multiple social dialogues and co-design activities, many times to respond to requests from our institutional and strategic allies, and on the other hand, (2) we conducted learning activities that indicated the importance of citizen participation in achieving objectives and results. During 2022, we explored cases and institutions of participatory governance in Paraguay and documented them in Participedia. A working paper combining lessons from that exploration is upcoming. We also implemented Tavarandu, our own Participatory Governance Development Program (https://www.undp.org/es/tavarandu), oriented to local governments and communities and focused on three main activities that generated a wellspring of qualitative data and stories: (a) A training program for municipal public servants on public innovation and citizen participation tools and methods, (b) a citizen laboratory methodology to localize and address SDG specific community challenges, and (c) a Bootcamp and Hackathon of Civic Technologies to explore the design and development of ICTs to support participatory processes in Paraguay.
Our closing form from 2022 documented lessons from our interventions with Tavarandu. The key challenges for participatory governance in Paraguay related to its design and facilitation aspects remain strong: citizen or community participation depends largely on the quality of its facilitation and process design to creatively circumvent social, institutional, political, and cultural barriers and enable significant, authentic and empowering participation. Moreover, the importance of community participation to enable good governance performance still holds true as well, making it highly important to strengthen local community organizations. 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. These lessons will mainly be integrated into future territorial urban planning and zoning processes, which we are helping our CO to explore in collaboration with the National Planning Ministry.
In addition, some of the participatory processes and dialogues we have designed and facilitated include: (a) a series of “scientific dialogues” with academics and science-related civil society organizations to discuss and identify consensus and dissensus regarding national R&D programs, (c) participatory workshops with the National Strategy of Innovation to identify the frontiers challenges for innovation policy at the national level, (d) participatory dialogue with members of the Paraguayan Network of Evaluation (https://repae.org.py/) regarding the future of public policy monitoring, as well as evaluation tools and methods, (e) an upcoming participatory forum to co-create a future innovation center for family agriculture, organized with the National University of Asunción and a local community of producers who donated part of their land to the University for the construction and operation of a local campus where this future innovation center will be located.
Some of the learning activities that generated insights about the role of participation include: (a) a case study about Family Health Units (USF) focused on positive deviance examples of good performance of their staff members, (b) a follow-up experiment to evaluate the impact of a training for USF´s staff members on participatory methods and principles to improve the quality of their planning, (c) the experimental use of participatory co-creation and decision-making methods in the context of innovation challenges such as Moiru and the Social Innovation Challenge of the National Council for Science and Technology, (d) participatory mapping and evaluation of activities in the context of UNDP´s inclusive recycling interventions in a community of informal waste pickers.
Value proposition: What added value or unique value proposition is your Accelerator Lab bringing to solving this challenge? Why is it your Lab that needs to work on this challenge and not other actors within UNDP, other stakeholders in the country respectively? Why is it worth investing resources to this challenge?
Our team can add value with (1) expertise and knowledge about methods and tools for designing and facilitating participatory processes, (2) integrating civic technologies and participatory evaluation methods into development action, and (3) providing good conceptual frameworks and practical tools to make impact evaluations of participatory processes something feasible for UNDP allies and organizations that are working in the same area of this challenge.
UNDP is uniquely positioned as a trusted ally to engage communities, organizations, and public institutions in a wide range of participatory processes. Not many institutions in government offer opportunities for participatory processes with the aim of generating binding decisions for public officials, which makes the challenge more difficult, but also positions participatory governance in a space where any potential learning will be highly strategic.
Short “tweet” summary: We would like to tweet what you are working on, can you summarize your challenge in a maximum of 280 characters?
From generating new data about social capital, economic vulnerability and collective action, to designing and facilitating participatory governance experiences, UNDP's #AccLab🇵🇾 is tapping into civic engagement and trust to accelerate SDGs to build brighter and more democratic communities.
Learning questions
Learning question: What is your learning question for this challenge? What do you need to know or understand to work on your challenge statement?
We maintain our original learning questions: ¿What are the institutional, cultural, political, and social barriers to enabling participatory forms of governance? ¿What is the space of opportunity to design, develop and implement binding participatory processes in decision-making processes of interest for citizens at different levels (community, city, region, country)
And add two more focalized: ¿to what extent the training of key actors and participants, combined with the use of participatory methods, can help localize and achieve SDGs at the level of local governments and communities? ¿to what extend the training of key actors and participants, combined with the use of participatory methods, can increase trust in, scale in citizens reach of, and quality of local planning processes such as the development of municipal territorial urban planning?
To what stage(s) in the learning cycle does your learning question relate?
Explore, Test
Usage of methods: Relating to your choice above, how will you use your methods & tools for this learning question? What value do these add in answering your learning question?
Our sensing phase taught us to what extent participatory governance plays a key role in reducing economic vulnerabilities, how important trust can be for enabling collective action, and how limited the capacities of our institutions are to design and facilitate participation in decision-making processes. Although we already observed the importance of participatory governance, and its potential impacts, we do not know the specific mechanisms or conditions under which this participation is or could be taking place. During our exploration phase, we have deepened our understanding of the different types of contexts in which participatory governance initiatives are taking place or could take place in Paraguay. We are going to use these lessons and the models for participatory processes we developed in Tavarandu to guide participatory action research in testing and documenting our interventions in specific participatory processes we can facilitate at the level of local governments.
Existing data gaps: Relating to your choice above, what existing gaps in data or information do these new sources of data addressing? What value do these add in answering your learning question?
1) Information on existing participatory institutions and their official mandates and design,
(2) There is very little organized and systematic documentation on the history of participation at different levels of Paraguayan Society, and
(3) there is a gap between available open-data, open-government initiatives and the use of this data for decision-making processes.
11Sustainable cities and communities
16Peace, justice and strong institutions
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