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Key Text Access to Basic Services for the Poor: The Importance of Good Governance

Author: Sheng, Y.K. et al
Date: 2007
Size: 64 pages (6.2 MB)

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Summary

What role can good governance play in attempts to implement the Millennium Development Goals and eliminate global poverty? This report, part of the Asia-Pacific MDG Study Series, argues that removing physical, legal, financial and socio-cultural barriers matters as much as monetary aid. Including more service providers - in the formal and informal sectors, and through civil society organisations and traditional institutions - will support this effort. Moreover, working towards good governance creates cycles of empowerment that will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of services and empower the poor to become agents of their own development.

Good governance is achieved when citizens cease to be passive recipients of services and become engaged in issues that matter to them. Nine key principles of good governance are: inclusiveness and equity, participation, transparency, efficiency, effectiveness, subsidiarity, adherence to the rule of law, accountability and sustainability.

This study focuses on problems and opportunities across Asia, representing collaborative work by the UNDP, Asian Development Bank and the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. Adopting the rights-based approach to development involves an emphasis on equity and inclusiveness. Poor people are seen as a set of diverse groups facing particular barriers, including remote location, weak capacity level (in education, health, a social network, income and assets, for example) and low quality of service provision. Inability to pay for services and employment in the informal sector are common hurdles.

Many of Asia’s poor remain locked in a cycle of deprivation, at the root of which is lack of political power and inclusion. They typically lack the power to claim rights and fight for access to core services. Lack of services keeps the poor from fuller development of their own capacities. Other findings include the following:

Adapting a service to contextual factors involves user empowerment. When users do not have the capacity and information to evaluate a service, and negotiate about it with a provider, local adaptations often fail.

Good governance is accompanied by new capacities and institutions, as well as by new ways of cooperating within existing organisations. It requires the adoption of inclusive non-discriminatory values and norms and the distribution of power between social groups.

Empowered communities understand the rights they possess to certain services and the means of obtaining them. They are also aware of the levers they have to hold both government and service provider accountable for service provision.

Alongside the MDGs, governments must be reminded of the need for inclusiveness, ensuring that access to basic service and the dividends of development are broadly shared. Implications include the following:

Communities should take responsibility for projects, thus earning the ability to avoid notorious contractors and direct the overall approach. A sense of pride and ownership will be an additional positive result.
As an example, parents should understand the educational needs of their children, demand that these needs are met by schools and hold government accountable.
Similarly, users of health services can only be considered empowered if able to express their needs and ideas.

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Source: Sheng, Y.K. et al, 2007, 'Access to Basic Services for the Poor: The Importance of Good Governance', Asia-Pacific MDG Study Series, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, United Nations Development Programme and Asian Development Bank
Organisation: United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia , http://www.unescap.org/