#makingallvoicescount

Kota Kita and Making All Voices Count (MAVC) are working together to strenghten the discourse on participatory budgeting in Indonesia

From February to September 2016, Kota Kita documented participatory budgeting practices, widely known as Musyawarah Perencanaan Pembangunan (Musrenbang), in six locations in Indonesia, including Yogyakarta, Makassar, Surabaya, Bandung and Municipality of Kebumen. The research observed and documented the experiences of participatory budgeting, and evaluated its constraints and prospects. The lenses that we are using to determine the dynamics of participation include how it is implemented on the  ground, levels of community engagement, innovation and technology, and the way in which development priorities are implemented. The resulting recommendations from the research advocate for the promotion of transparent, inclusive and effective models of participatory budgeting.

Kota Kita and Making All Voices Count are collaborating to encourage advocacy efforts and strengthen discourse about participatory budgeting in Indonesia. As part of our research  we will be holding a national workshop entitled: Revitalizing the Musrenbang for Inclusive and Transparent Participatory Budgeting in Indonesian Cities. The workshop, which will bring together local and national government, NGOs, researchers, and university students, will present the results of the research into participatory budgeting experiences in Indonesian cities, share recommendations, and facilitate discussion about its future. It aims to consolidate interest in strengthening adovacy platforms towards more inclusive and transparant participatory budgeting in Indonesia.

We invite researchers, media, university students, and public who are interested to learn further about participatory budgeting practices in Indonesia to join the workshop.

Date: November 2, 2016 Time: 09:00-16:30 Venue: Millenium Hotel, Kebon Sirih, Jakarta

Read the report here

Duncan Edwards has published a summary of some key themes from a February event run by Making All Voices Count, on learning about where tech is useful in projects that try to lead to more accountable governance.

It’s worth a read because it summarises some important recent bits of research about what makes projects more likely to suceed (which we'll post on The Compiler soon). We also like that they put the report on a microsite as well as a PDF. We've summarised the summaries and highlighted a couple of questions from the report here:

'Thick and thin engagement': - Thick engagement describes small on- or offline groups where people discuss a range of views on an issue, then decide how they want to solve problems - 'Thin engagement' being mainly online activities where people can express their opinions, make choices or affiliate themselves with a particular group or cause.

Question to look into: Do too many tech-for-governance projects focus on thin engagement (which is quicker and easier), without trying hard enough to combine it with thick engagement?

Vertically integrated action means strategically engaging at many different pressure points within different structures and levels of civil society and government. For example, it could involve projects that combine policy advocacy with citizen-based protests, all acting upon the same issue in different ways.

Looking at accountability ecosystems means understanding how different groups looking at an issue interact with each other. Those groups could include multiple actors from grassroots groups to government reformers and multiple levels of government (from district- to national-level). Then, the idea is that you select multiple tools and approaches (including advocacy, monitoring, legal empowerment and investigative journalism) depending on which groups are strongest in particular areas.