There was a need to devolve responsibility of monitoring service providers such as education, health, water and sanitation, to the people, in fact beyond the district level, so as the people could themselves monitor the quality of services and conduct accountability of low quality services.
Dr Shantayanan Devarajan, World Bank's Chief Economist, expressed these views while giving a presentation on 'Decentralisation and Social Service Delivery' to senior bureaucrats and scholars at Pakistan Administrative Staff College Lahore on Wednesday.
During the talks, he pointed out several flaws in the decentralisation system in the developing countries such as mis-aligned responsibility, local political capture and capacity constraints, which has created failure in the accountability of service providers.
He said that under the devolution, the service providers were run by both national and local policy markers, the overlapping has created an obstacle in the running of such institutions.
"Thus, there was need to define a clear-cut system by devolving the accountability powers to the grassroots level so as the service providers were held accountable for providing low quality services. This could be done by encouraging citizen monitoring groups who would be responsible for supervising social sectors and monitoring its quality," he added.
According to Dr Shantayanan, 'local political capture' was another factor that was creating problem in the decentralisation system. The people were held hostage by local pressure groups that mostly run the local governments. Such local governments know the fact that they would be re-elected despite not attending to the people's grievances against the service providers. Hence, it was imperative to educate people and make the local bodies more transparent.
"Breakdown in accountability of service providers leads to low quality services, and decentralisation could either overcome or exacerbate accountability failure," the WB chief economist concluded.
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