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“Knowledge based decision making improves management quality and trust.”
In the past, the issues affecting public life have used to be decided jointly by those with a right to vote. Democracy, which could be considered as “participatory” in this understanding, eventually turned into “representative” democracy; because both the number of participants, and the complexity and diversity of the decisions have increased. However, as the interests of the representatives did not overlap with societal interests from time to time (the ‘agency problem’), and as willingness of the citizens to participate in decisions influencing their lives have increased with the technological developments in the field of education and communication, this trend has been reversed in the 21st century and a new form of participatory democracy started to gain importance. Hence, civil society organizations have started to play a role in taking societal decisions together with the elected.
There are certain preconditions for increasing participation which is the basis of good governance: (i) creation of processes open to participation, (ii) bringing together the civil society organizations which will ensure effective participation, and (iii) making sure that participants have access to information and that necessary training for meaningful participation is provided. ARGE has contributed to the development of and leading a Turkish think-tank, TESEV that focuses on good governance. Our Chairman also led TESEV’s “Good Governance Programme” which is one of the priority work areas of TESEV and it is aimed at (a) improving the quality of the strategic planning processes of local governments for the realizations of subsidiarity and effectiveness principles; (b) establishment of organizations and processes for increasing participation; (c) creation of methods to increase accessibility to information necessary for ensuring meaningful participation with the principles of transparency, accountability and consistency and enabling the systematization of information to provide input to public decision making.
Taking managerial decisions in line with strategic plans, realization of these plans in a participatory manner and monitoring of the developments by the citizens being affected by these decisions, increases the quality of decisions taken by the public officials. That is why, this TESEV project aims the realization of provincial strategic plans in a participatory manner whose preparation has become compulsory with the ‘Local Government Reform’.
As it is highly difficult for every citizen to participate in every decision-making process directly, it is important those well functioning civil society organizations are developed in these provinces and that their management capacities are developed so that they could be the agents of participation. However, even if there exist civil society organizations ensuring participation, there are two more requirements for the decisions to be taken in a participatory manner: (i) public officials that use public authority in the provinces such as governor and mayor should encourage participation by demonstrating a management approach open to participation, and (ii) the process on how the elected and the appointed managers who are authorized to take the final decisions with regards to the utilization of public resources will collaborate with the representatives of civil society organizations should be clearly formulated.
Information is necessary for the improvement of the quality of decisions. For this reason, three main studies are carried out within the scope of the project: (i) socio-economic development maps, (ii) public expenditure analyses and (iii) public service satisfaction surveys. All three tools provide critical inputs to form the basis of participatory strategic planning. Socio-economic development maps help to understand the existing situation in each province concerning essential issues such as education, health, security, and income. Public expenditure analyses lay out how resources are allocated by the public to each province or to each mahalle (neighborhood) for the provision of public services. Finally, public service satisfaction surveys are used to determine the level of citizen satisfaction through independent surveys in order to identify the priorities of the community.
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