People Power beyond elections and revolutions

New documentary from TVE Asia Pacific profiles social accountability in practice

In much of the Asia Pacific, 2004 is going to be the Year of the Voter. By coincidence, at least 17 countries in the region have scheduled national, presidential or provincial/state level elections during the year. Some more may face snap polls if governments in office collapse, or decide to go in for early elections.

If elections are the most conspicuous measure of democratic development, Asia will witness remarkable variety of them before the year ends. Major elections dominate the political landscape of Asia in 2004. Nearly 1.2 billion people will be eligible to cast their votes -- in polls for presidents, parliaments and legislatures.

For some countries, this year's elections will be special: Afghanis will be setting up their new government after the ouster of the Taliban in November 2001, and Indonesia, with the world's largest Muslim population, will hold its first-ever direct vote for president. From Iran to the Philippines, it is a year that heralds an opportunity for change, one that the voters will cast their verdict on.

Click here for 2004 Asia Pacific elections calendar.

In the wake of this bounty of elections, a new international documentary by TVE Asia Pacific raises fundamental questions: How can ordinary people hold elected governments and public officials accountable for their decisions and actions taken, and funds managed? In what ways can governments of the people be made to behave as true governments for the people?

After discussing these questions for centuries, and having tried out many models and methods, we still don't have one sweeping solution to this widely shared and deeply felt need. Given the diversity of cultures, societies and communities around the world, it's unlikely that one approach will work for everyone with equal results.

The documentary, titled People Power, was first broadcast on BBC World in February 2004, as part of TVE's regular Earth Report programme. Its conclusion: elections are necessary, but not sufficient, to ensure that people's wishes prevail. Citizens need to engage elected officials and governments on a more regular basis.

It was Sir Winston Churchill who said: "At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper." In the modern world, elections alone cannot ensure that people's wishes prevail. Better models of engagement are needed…and are being developed across the globe.

Historically, people responded to bad governance by rejecting governments at elections, and occasionally by overthrowing corrupt and despotic regimes through mass agitation. This "people power" has toppled rulers in a number of countries in Asia and Eastern Europe, and made life difficult for unpopular or autocratic governments elsewhere.

Yet people power has its own limits: in country after country where one political party - or indeed political system - was replaced with another through popular vote or revolt, people have been disappointed or dismayed at how quickly the new brooms lose their bristles. The solution must, therefore, lie in not just participating in elections or revolutions, but in constantly engaging governments and keeping the pressure on them to govern well - or else.

Realising this need has led to the development of many methods and practices to make governments and public officials accountable, especially in between elections. Even in the most hopeless situations, ordinary people and their organisations have often managed to come together to collect their voice and exert pressure on the government to be responsive to their needs and concerns.

Social accountability (SA) -- people or civil society organisations getting together to demand accountability from the state - goes well beyond simple protest. This relatively new approach involves the careful gathering of data, their systematic analysis and knowledge-based engagement and negotiation with elected and other public officials. Crucial to this process is accessing and using critical information - about budgets, expenditures, excesses, corruption, performance, etc. The new breed of citizen voice is thus about using information in a way that leads to positive change. In the emerging knowledge-based society, citizens are using knowledge as a pivotal tool to improve governance, use of common property resources, and management of public funds collected through taxation or borrowed from international finance institutions such as the IMF or World Bank.

People Power is a new half-hour international television documentary that takes a journey across four continents to find out. Produced by TVE Asia Pacific in late 2003, the programme was filmed on four continents and edited on the fifth (in Sydney, Australia). It was first broadcast on the global satellite channel BBC World in February 2004, on TVE's weekly slot Earth Report.

The four stories featured come from India, Malawi, Brazil and Ireland. The programme also features interviews with Hernando de Soto of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru, Steen Jorgensen of the World Bank and Dr Bela Bhatix, Associate Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in India.

Short summaries of the four case studies:

Rajasthan, India

It's state elections in Rajasthan and Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a local activist group invites the people of Beawar to a public meeting where the affidavits on the local candidates are made available to the people. This process of social accountability and transparency extends beyond the political process to the village level, where the MKSS has successfully lobbied for the right to information legislation to overcome the systemic corruption in the political and bureaucratic organisations.

"India is the largest functioning democracy in the world and it has significant strengths (but) it also has weaknesses," says Dr Bela Bhatix, Associate Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in India. "Among the strengths is that we have been able to sustain our democracy…It's no small matter to have regular elections and we usually have something like 60 per cent turnout -- around 600 million people, or twice the size of America. But at the same time there are some very important weaknesses of our democracy which we really need to think about."

Says Aruna Roy, coordinator of MKSS: "In 1996, the MKSS sat in a 40-day sit in Beawar and we were demanding the right to access records of the Panchayat, the smallest elected body in India. We involved the entire city and made it a people's campaign. We involved people from all over India, and the national campaign for people's right to information was born."

Malawi

In Malawi, Africa, people can expect to live only half as long as someone in the Western World. Since most people live in rural communities, the Village Health Service is the life line for most people. But there has been dissatisfaction with the delivery of this service. Care Malawi is piloting a local health initiative program, referred to as the Community Scorecard Project, where the running of the local health services is put back into the hands of the villagers. Here the village people meet and score the delivery of the health services and this is collated by a Village Health Council. At the same time, the Village Health Clinic does a self assessment. Interface meetings between the users of the service and the providers of the service to analyse the information and work out ways of improving the system.

CARE Malawi's Local Initiatives for Health Project Manager, Virginia Kamowa, says: "In one community a community member said 'it is good to work in this project because what you've done is taught us how to fish instead of giving us fish you're teaching us how to fish.' So to them they think it is very good, and even if the project phases out they still remain with their skills and their sustainability will be there."

Porto Alegre, Brazil

Porto Alegre has been acclaimed as the Brazilian city with the best quality of life for four consecutive years. The challenge is how to include the poorer people in this success. Housing is the major challenge for the City as rural people migrate to the city to seek work. The city government has adopted a program where the people participate in prioritising the City Budget. Over a year, from neighbourhood associations to people's assemblies, up to 20,000 people have a direct say on how the city budget should be allocated.

We meet Nelci Alves who is 84 years old, and has participated in this process for the past 20 years to improve the slum housing in her district. She has now successfully obtained the finance to rebuild homes for 230 families.

The Porto Alegre experiment is one of the best known worldwide, acclaimed for both the efficient and the highly democratic management of urban resources it has made possible. The "popular administration" of Porto Alegre was selected by the United Nations as one of the 40 urban innovations worldwide to be presented at the Second Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II), held in Istanbul in June 1996.

Mayor Joao Verle says: "I believe in this project since I was one of those responsible for starting it 15 years ago. The participatory budget is now part of the organic life of this city - people can change it any time they please. And this makes it more adaptive to the people's needs."

Ireland

Ireland has one of the most thriving economies in Europe yet twenty years ago this was not the picture. A social and economic partnership was formed with all the stakeholders: the national government, the trade unions, the employers and the community to develop a national strategy for Ireland.

The Northside Partnership was one of 11 partnerships created to translate the national strategy to the local level. This partnership identified the black spots: high local unemployment, youth leaving before they completed school and young children not going to school. Within this community, there has been an increase of over 50 per cent job creation, a series of specialised training programs and an innovate way to get children to go to school.

Peter Cassells, chair of the National Economic and Social Partnership Programme, says: "Since issues are more complex, it's important to involve the people who are affected by the problem you are trying to address but also the people who deliver the solutions at the lowest possible level. And I think that's the way that democracy will work in the future."

Click here to see the programme credits