Disclaimer:
Please be aware that the content herein has not been peer reviewed. It consists of personal reflections, insights, and learnings of the contributor(s). It may not be exhaustive, nor does it aim to be authoritative knowledge.
Title
Please provide a name for your action learning plan.
Toward more and better participatory governance, trust, and social capital in Paraguay
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...”.)
Participatory governance opportunities and capacities are limited in Paraguay, while at the same time, where they exist, they are linked to lower levels of economic vulnerability, stronger social capital, and increased levels of trust. Over the past two years, we have generated evidence and understanding about how to design, promote, facilitate, test, and improve participatory institutions, processes, and practices to achieve sustainable development. As a result of these learnings, we have created Tavarandu, a program for action-based capacity building in participatory governance, where people learn as they engage with participatory processes in the form of citizen laboratories. The flexible portfolio of tools and methodologies that emerged from this program is now ready to scale. Our challenge now is about how can this knowledge diffuse to catalyze sustainable development, while we continue to generate new answers to this ever-changing landscape of participatory governance through new explorations and experiments. Paramount to this challenge is to ensure it reaches the right people, in governments, communities, civil society, academia, and cooperation organizations.
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 elevated levels of administrative and fiscal centralization. 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.
In addition to this historical and empirical context, local governments face a situation of limited resources to tackle growing social and economic exclusion gaps. The legitimacy of their proposals is threatened by historical failures to address challenges in education, healthcare, access to affordable and nutritious food, and dignified employment, which are worsened by the climate crisis and organized crime's territorial control disputes. This jeopardizes competitiveness in a world that is increasingly complex and interconnected, with emerging technologies accelerating development in some places while deepening the divide with those territories that stay behind. Many of these creeping problems are ‘trans-boundary’ in nature and thus require coordinated responses from several tiers of government and/or multiple organizations from all sectors. The direct implication of this is that these challenges require dialogue, negotiation, and planning, particularly at the level of local governments. The need for more and better participatory governance is clear.
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). All these initiatives have generated useful quantitative data that links to this challenge. Below, some links where we refer to this data. In 2023, we worked in two municipalities, where we implemented our signature program, Tavarandu, generating a whole new set of rich and deep data. In the quantitative side, now we have data about how training public servants and then helping the co-facilitate participatory activities does increase levels of trust. Moreover, using heuristic evaluation, we also have some data about how trained public servants are more likely to introduced participatory governance tools in other local governance processes and activities.
https://www.py.undp.org/content/paraguay/es/home/blog/2021/Mapeando-el-capital-social---accion-colectiva-en-tiempos-de-pandemia---Parte-I.html https://www.undp.org/publications/social-capital-paraguay-asset-combatting-vulnerability-during-covid-19-pandemic https://www.undp.org/es/paraguay/publicaciones/social-capital https://www.undp.org/es/paraguay/publicaciones/wp-tavarandu https://www.undp.org/es/paraguay/blog/lexperiment-2 https://www.undp.org/es/experiment
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. The main lesson from (1) is that one of the key challenges for participatory governance in Paraguay is related to its design and facilitation aspects: citizen or community participation depends 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. The key insight from (2) points to the importance of community participation to enable good governance performance while strengthening local community organizations.
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 (Research & Development) 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.
In 2023, we worked in two municipalities, implementing and refining our signature program, Tavarandu, generating a whole new set of rich and deep data. In the qualitative side of this, we have collected participant observations and self-reflections about how training public servants and then helping the co-facilitate participatory activities enables co-creation and better trust relations between public institutions and citizens. Part of the challenge this year is to analyze this data to identify the key insights that will help us diffuse and catalyze development based on the accumulated evidence generated by this portfolio.
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. Based on the lessons we learned over the past two years, we can also offer (4) evidence about how training public officials and co-facilitating participatory activities with them leads to an increase in trust and better perception of the importance of public goods. This in turns enable us to (5) easily design new models of participatory governance programs that can be adapted to new purposes, from enabling urban and territorial planning to facilitating a participatory and anticipatory implementation of the social protection system at the local level.
UNDP is uniquely positioned as a trusted ally to engage communities, organizations, and public institutions in a wide range of participatory processes. Few 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?
👉🏼 Collective action is at the heart of how communities improve their social capital, cohesion, and resilience. AccLabPY is turning learnings into actions that promote collective action to catalyze effective, anticipatory, and participatory governance for sustainable development. More participation means more trust: a much-needed outcome to fight the democratic backsliding we face today.
Partners
Who are your top 5 partners for this challenge? Please submit from MOST to LEAST important and state Name, Sector and a brief description of the (intended) collaboration.
Please state the name of the partner:
New partnerships for this challenge include engaging a new set of municipal governments as we diffuse the lessons we learned in previous years and scale up our signature Program Tavarandu with new and pioneer experiences, such as the Local Government Public Policy School at Encarnación. After the institutional re-engineering that merged the planning ministry into the Economy and Finance Ministry (MEF), we need to reconnect and explore new partnerships with the national government. An opportunity at this level is emerging with the Social Development Ministry and the presidential Social Cabinet, which needs participatory governance tools and methods for the implementation of the territorial boards of the Social Protection System in 22 new municipalities. In addition to this, CO (Country Office) projects that work in the space of urban and territorial planning are now re-activating their initiatives and are looking for our support, which would entail working with the units in STP (Secretariat for Planning) MEF that are now in charge of territorial planning.
What sector does our partner belong to?
Government (&related)
Please provide a brief description of the collaboration.
The planning unit at MEF (still in process of creation after the institutional merger) regulates the creation and delivery of local development plans, and requires citizen participation, even though this mandate is not specified in its forms and processes. We are exploring the opportunity of working with Local Development Councils to engage them in participatory processes that commit more community members to the planning process. With the Social Cabinet Ministries and the Social Development Ministry, we are exploring the possibility of integrating more participatory governance into the territorial boards of the Social Protection System, which are now being created in 22 municipalities. With the Municipality of Encarnacion we signed a MOU in February, and we are working together to create the first Local Government of Public Policy, as a scale up of Tavarandu in the district, open to the other districts from the department and the country. Also, we are working to mobilize resources in order to scale up Tavarandu country wide.
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?
¿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 various levels (community, city, region, country)
To what stage(s) in the learning cycle does your learning question relate?
Explore, Test, Grow
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. Our exploration questions call us to deepen our understanding of the diverse types of contexts in which participatory governance initiatives are taking place or could take place in Paraguay. We are going to use these participatory action research methods in the exploration and documentation of interesting case studies of citizen engagement across the country, to uncover the factors that explain both success and failure, look for solutions to the underlying problems that limit citizen participation, and identify opportunities for experimentation a feasible and highly beneficial way. We have already documented cases of participatory governance in the past, but as we mobilized resources from the National Science Council, we will be expanding that exploration this year, to deepen our understanding with the goal of giving nuance to the answers we currently have for this question.
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 extraordinarily little organized and systematic documentation on the history of participation at various 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.
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?
What is the impact of participatory governance processes and practices on interpersonal and institutional trust, social capital, and cohesion? What is the impact of participatory processes on the quality of the design and delivery of public goods, services, infrastructure, and policy?
To what stage(s) in the learning cycle does your learning question relate?
Test, Grow
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?
Pilot projects and -if we find the opportunity- randomized controlled trials that test participatory governance initiatives will be the focus of our learning activities to answer these questions. Our lab and its institutional partners will organize and facilitate these initiatives, propose methodologies for participatory design, and, more broadly, any method that enables the emergence of collective intelligence. In this case, it is expected that our allies allocate a part of their budgets or resources to carry out these initiatives If we cannot find the right opportunity to test participatory processes in a real scenario, we will simulate small-scale binding participatory processes, with funding provided by the lab, and with a focus on designing and implementing public common goods in specific communities and territories. The goal of our portfolio of experiments is to build a proof-of-concept of what a binding citizen engagement process looks like in the Paraguayan context.
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 extraordinarily little organized and systematic documentation on the history of participation at various levels of Paraguayan Society, and (3) there is a gap between available open-data and open-government initiatives and the use of this data for decision-making processes.
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?
Can future scenario methodologies applied to local governments facilitate essential dialogues issues related to social resilience and protection, and create opportunities for participatory governance that counteracts negative trends? To what extent can we improve the capacity of local participatory platforms for the social protection system to anticipate crisis and conflict to better address their local challenges and improve social resilience, cohesion, and overall trust in democratic institutions?
To what stage(s) in the learning cycle does your learning question relate?
Sense, Explore
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?
Depending on resources we hope to mobilize, we will pilot anticipatory governance methodologies and practices while establishing territorial participatory governance collaboration platforms for the social protection system in 10 new territories (with a potential to include 12 more based on a dynamic monitoring and management of the project’s implementation), in collaboration with the Ministry of Social Development. Leveraging the successful implementation of the Tavarandu Participatory Governance for Local Governments [1] program over the past two years, we will strengthen the local social protection system platform to deepen its impact. By directly connecting it with a high-impact public policy, such as the Social Protection System at the territorial level, we aim to promote greater participation and a more organized and proactive response to emerging local problems before they reach the tipping point that turn challenges into crisis and conflict.
[1] In the search of Tavarandu: Lessons on Public Innovation and Participatory Governance in Local Governments. https://www.undp.org/es/paraguay/publicaciones/wp-tavarandu
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?
The Social Protection System has been designed in such a way that its contextualization and implementation at the local level is done through the articulation of all the institutions that are part of the Social Cabinet. Some Social Protection programs are hosted within the Public Health Ministry, others in the Social Development Program. Some are hosted within local governments, and the list goes on. Coordination and articulation are complex and heavily depend upon the local context, which is why a local territorial board is created in each municipality to provide the governance to the system at that scale. Not much is known about the performance of these boards, but some preliminary studies have signaled to problems in the following elements of the system: (1) there is a need for better territorial linkage in each local government by appointing focal points able to articulate and facilitate these boards, (2) the local territorial boards are often ill-created following political interest rather than diversity or representativity criteria; (3) territorial boards need a good assessment of the local needs and the available offer for social protection at the local level, and this information is not readily available as there is a need for R&D (Research & Development) skills to generate such assessments, (4) strategic and operation planning is another challenge that territorial boards are struggling to address, (5) days of service have been put in place, but they are still incipient and need strengthening, (6) the integrated social protection record and the protocol to report references and counter references are still in need of upgrading and improvement.
Can these challenges be addressed by more and better participation on the boards? Can we use our tools and methods to improve the performance of territorial boards?
Closing
Early leads to grow: Think about the possible grow phase for this challenge - who might benefit from your work on this challenge or who might be the champions in your country that you should inform or collaborate with early on to help you grow this challenge?
We have observed, both in exploration and in experimentation, how participatory governance leads to more trust. When public servants are trained in participatory governance methods, and later apply them in actual citizen laboratories, citizens who participate tend to increase how much investment they would make in public goods managed by their local governments (a proxy to institutional trust). This is a quantitative result we have previously observed qualitatively in 2022, with the addition that not only local governments benefit from this type of action-driven learning, but also civil society and community organizations do so. Remains to see how much this holds when we scale it up from less than 5 municipalities and 100+ citizens to 20+ cities and thousands of citizens, and when we put the program in practice in contexts with and without the participation of organized civil society in the form of community organizations. Is there a type of public servant or territory that we need to focus on? Can we leverage our methods and lessons learned from previous experiences with a positive deviance approach to performance in the public sector?
Moreover, the increase in trust in youth is a signal that how we engage with youth can also lead to more participation of youth in other political processes. Can we increase electoral participation through these means?
Finally, most participatory processes we have tested end up in the co-creation of some form of community commons. We have observed in previous studies how community commons reduce vulnerabilities. Can we scale this result too? How do we fund a portfolio of community commons designed and managed by citizens in true participatory forms of governance?
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10Reduced innequalities
11Sustainable cities and communities
16Peace, justice and strong institutions
17Partnerships for the goals
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