Appropriating Technology for Accountability: Messages from Making All Voices Count

Between June 2013 and November 2017, the Making All Voices Count programme made grants for innovation and scaling projects that aimed to amplify the voices of citizens and enable governments to listen and respond. Conceived in an era of optimism about the use of tech to open up government and allow more fluid communication between citizens and governments, it supported the development and spread of innovative ideas in 12 countries across Africa and Asia for securing responsive, accountable government – many of them involving tools and platforms based on mobile phone and web technologies. This synthesis report reviews the Making All Voices Count's operational experience and learning. In doing so, it revisits and assesses the key working assumptions and expectations about the roles that technologies can play in governance.

The report begins by providing an overview of Making All Voices Count's approach. Implemented by a consortium consisting of Hivos (as the lead agency), the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), and Ushahidi, it used funding from the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID), the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Omidyar Network to support new ideas. Noted here: "Expectations about how increased access to and engagement with technologies would contribute to making governance responsive and accountable rested on some key assumptions, variously implicit and explicitly stated in Making All Voices Count's theory of change:

• Increasing the number of citizens who can relate directly and individually with their government will increase the chances of citizens' voices 'counting', in the sense of contributing to more accountable, responsive governance.
• It will soon be possible for all citizens' voices everywhere to be expressed through tech-enabled channels.
• Innovative solutions will be appropriate for the context of their application.
• 'Use cases' will exist in every application - that is, for every potential use of a technology (its 'affordance', in technologists' language) there is a reason or purpose to make use of the affordance.
• Potential users will have sufficient confidence in the innovations, and their likelihood of effectiveness, to take them up and use them."

The report draws on 2 datasets: (i) a synthesis of evidence from Making All Voices Count's 120+ research-, evidence-, and learning-focused publications; and (ii) the insights and knowledge that arose from the innovation, scaling, and research projects funded through the programme, and the related grant accompaniment activities. It shares 14 key messages on the roles technologies can play in enabling citizen voice and accountable and responsive governance.

The first message (Message 1) is that not all voices can be expressed via technologies. This is due to the simple fact that only around half of the world's population is online, and growth rates in the number of users have been falling rather than increasing over the past few years (IWS 2017; Internet Society 2016).

The remainder of the messages, each with examples of Making All Voices Count projects, are presented in 4 sections:

1. Applying technologies as technical fixes to solve service delivery problems
   • Message 2. Technologies can play decisive roles in improving services where the problem is a lack of planning data or user feedback. Numerous projects supported by Making All Voices Count set out to follow one or both of 2 pathways to change: (i) the "information stream" - information generated, channelled, or opened up with the help of technologies fills an information gap, and the problem is solved; and (ii) the "feedback stream" - through feedback provided by citizens or users, governments or service providers know what citizens or users think of them and their performance, and respond by becoming more accountable and responsive to citizens. Video and digital-mapping technologies have proven particularly useful for moving issues up the agendas of government actors. Many of the projects cited succeeded by applying technologies that generate and manage information or data directly, which in turn makes the design, provision, monitoring, and delivery of services respond better to people's needs and priorities.
   • Message 3. Common design flaws in tech-for-governance initiatives often limit their effectiveness or their governance outcomes. Insights into how to design effective tech-supported approaches to claiming accountability include:
     • "Technologies need to be suited or adapted to the contexts in which they are introduced. Success often lies in using existing technologies that are already part of the lives of the users. If new tech systems are introduced, the incentives to use these need to be 'designed in' to the project.
     • Different technologies offer different affordances: they give users the potential to do certain kinds of things. If technologies are to generate change in accountability processes, these affordances need to match the needs, desires and agency of intended users.
     • Technology initiatives need to take a systemic perspective, being mindful of the skills, training and support that citizens need to use the technologies, and ensuring that supportive civic infrastructure is in place.
     • Tech initiatives based on user research and trials are more likely to be taken up and achieve their aims...
     • Projects that continuously adapt to meet changing contexts and user needs are more likely to sustain citizen engagement...
     • If implemented adaptively, many tech-for-governance projects end up using simpler technologies than they had originally anticipated, or altering the foreseen balance of online and offline activities."
   • Message 4. Transparency, information, or open data are not sufficient to generate accountability. "Overall, within Making All Voices Count's portfolio, a number of innovation projects demonstrated the role that tech-enabled information can play in improving services. These tended to be in cases where the political will existed to 'put it right' and bureaucrats, technicians or elected representatives lacked only the capacity and information to do so. Those that achieved sustainable and transformative impacts on responsiveness and accountability - distinct from eliciting short-term responses or fixes, or those that succeeded under relatively favourable conditions - have done so by deploying technology as one among many factors, and often a much less significant factor than anticipated in the initial project design."
2. Applying technologies to broader, systemic governance challenges
   • Message 5. Technologies can support social mobilisation and collective action by connecting citizens. "Large-scale aggregations of citizen voice and well-articulated, mobilised collectives can both be achieved through everyday technologies that people already use, such as WhatsApp, SMS [text messaging] or Facebook. They are harder to ignore than multiple isolated individual voices, and can be decisive in shifting the power balance in favour of citizens whose voices or concerns have previously received scant public attention. In certain cases, where many relatively isolated, powerless individuals were constituted into more powerful collective actors, they were capable of contesting and challenging government policies, decisions or behaviours and getting credible, compelling alternative proposals accepted."
   • Message 6. Technologies can create new spaces for engagement between citizen and state. "In some cases, where citizens use technologies such as WhatsApp groups to connect and discuss issues, government officials are included within these networks. This engages them more closely and helps to position them as reformers and champions of accountability..."
   • Message 7. Technologies can help to empower citizens and strengthen their agency for engagement. "Some technologies...offer informational and communicational affordances that are more sophisticated than simple, direct information-processing, or one-to-one or one-to-many communication. They can therefore contribute in more subtle, indirect ways to improving citizen voice and government accountability and responsiveness - as long as they are applied within the right social context and process. However, judging from the projects within the Making All Voices Count portfolio, it would seem that technology innovations have yet to be developed that can sustain and promote nuanced, interrogative and deliberative forms of engagement between states and citizens, or service providers and citizens, in the absence of carefully designed and facilitated social processes and the purposeful agency of social actors (Feruglio and Gilberds 2017)."
3. Applying technologies to build the foundations of democratic and accountable governance systems
   • Message 8. The kinds of democratic deliberation needed to challenge a systemic lack of accountability are rarely well supported by technologies. "Ultimately, meaningful deliberation requires dialogue - communication back and forth within and between groups - rather than the one-way transmission of information, or the provision of circumscribed input that is afforded by most mechanisms that connect citizens and states. The rare counter-examples within Making All Voices Count's research are cases where tech-based means of interaction were carefully situated within, and interwoven with, wider, offline processes of democratic renewal, triggered by political contestation."
   • Message 9. Technologies alone don't foster the trusting relationships needed between governments and citizens, and within each group of actors. Insights to inform more effective practice:
     • "Key factors in reducing the distance between public officials and citizens claiming responsiveness include the way that public officials perceive the legitimacy of citizen claims, the credibility of claims-makers, and trust between public officials and citizens.
     • Important challenges in the everyday work of reformist bureaucrats are the need to convince colleagues and other actors within their bureaucracies of the importance of their proposed reforms, and to create coalitions with actors - both within and outside the state.
     • For [information and communication technology, or] ICT-enabled 'voice and feedback' mechanisms to deliver results for citizens, three elements need careful and equal attention: (1) government willingness is one of the most important factors, but it is useful to give equal consideration to (2) government 'processing' of the inputs it receives (analysis and channelling of the input, and preparing to respond) and (3) government response (initial and ongoing responsiveness to the specific inputs).
     • Problematising and understanding the issue of scale is helpful for addressing the anti-accountability forces that are systemically embedded in multiple levels and branches of the state, and for working towards more responsive government."
   • Message 10. The capacities needed to transform governance relationships are developed offline and in social and political processes, rather than by technologies. "This was recognised in many Making All Voices Count-supported initiatives, either from the outset or part-way through. Consequently, they adapted their approaches by, for instance, adding the provision of rights-awareness training to citizens as an offline accompaniment to the technological component of their project; or supporting the development of participants' individual and collective power to engage more effectively with more powerful actors."
   • Message 11. Technologies can't overturn the social norms that underpin many accountability gaps and silence some voices. "Providing new technologies or channels is not sufficient to engage, enable and hear from people whose voices have rarely been heard and never been recognised or heeded - whose experience of governance power relationships makes them feel they have nothing of value to say....Given the historical weight and embeddedness of such social norms, and even though technologies can facilitate processes that attempt to change them, the innovations that are really needed are in governance practices and social relations, not technologies."
4. Applying technologies for the public bad
   • Message 12. A deepening digital divide risks compounding existing exclusions. "Given Internet penetration rates that range from 7% to 54% in Making All Voices Count countries (World Bank 2016), this carries the very real risk of disempowerment and disenfranchisement of very significant proportions of their populations, and the recentralisation and de-democratisation of their states."
   • Message 13. New technologies expand the possibilities for surveillance, repression, and the manufacturing of consent. "At programme learning events, some Making All Voices Count grant recipients described how participation in their projects exposed citizens to surveillance and harassment, either online in the case of those logging complaints through apps or platforms (Smit et al. 2017), or offline in the case of physical harassment and intimidation at Internet access points established for citizen journalists in informal settlements. ICTs sometimes offer an illusion of anonymity and free speech, while actually assisting others in identifying and curtailing dissent."
   • Message 14. Uncritical attitudes towards new technologies, data, and the online space risk narrowing the frame of necessary debates about accountable governance. "It is possible for governments to be transparent but undemocratic, and release large amounts of data but clamp down heavily on any dissent and criticism that might result. Openness is only one element of accountable governance, and only part of how we should measure it."

In conclusion: "Seen in relation to an end goal of improving the accountability and responsiveness of governance, the contribution of tech-enabled, individual, direct voice has been weak compared to the importance of collective, organised processes that combine online and offline approaches. Put differently, the contribution of tech innovation has been less than that of tech-aware social innovation in making voices count."