Citizens will evaluate public services with report cards
02/04/2010 - Viewed 1667 times
ANKARA- TEPAV Citizen Report Cards Training Program was held on 27-21 March at Ankara in cooperation with the World Bank and with the participation of city councils.
The training was participated by the secretariat, executive board members, and women and youth assemblies from Kocaeli, Bursa, Çanakkale, Manisa, Diyarbakır, Van, Ordu, and Giresun city councils as well as academics that contribute to city council operations, and representatives from State Planning Organization, the Treasury, and from the Ministry of Finance.
In the assessment session carried out on the last day of trainings, participants from city councils declared their will to bring the citizens report card application into practice in the cities they operate.
Citizen Report Cards
Citizen report cards which were first developed in India 1993 and used in many countries since then can be defined as a monitoring and evaluation tool which is proved to be influential in improving service quality at local level.
Citizen report cards collect through a survey the assessment of citizens for public services in terms of quality, access, satisfaction, or corruption and enable citizens to grade the public administrations or services.
The subjects to be addressed in the citizen report card surveys and the assessment of survey results are carried out with active participation by civil society institutions. This way, the application goes beyond a technical survey project and turns into a supervision tool for the public which assesses the service performance.
As a result of the public administration restructuring efforts and the advance of the civil society organizations, the concepts accountability and calling public authorities for being accountable become to be discussed more commonly over the last decade.
It is maintained that the citizen report card approach will be useful for Turkey in identifying the perception of citizens for local services and in facilitating the dialogue between the civil society at local level and the public authorities through the quality of service provision.
City Councils
Training seminar was designed for and presented to City Councils, a structure unique for Turkey gathering central government, local government and civil society organizations on the basis of the principles such as protecting the city, and ensuring cooperation in solution and active participation. City councils established in almost 60 cities since 1997 under the context of the Local Agenda 21 Program were covered in the Law of Municipalities in 2006. Since then the councils are being launched almost in all cities. The most important feature of city councils with respect to the citizen reports card approach is that they establish a dialogue mechanism between the providers and the beneficiaries of the services and lay the groundwork for a healthy platform of accountability.
