Regional Workshop on Local Social Accountability

I2UD and Co-PLAN, together with the World Bank Institute, held a Regional Dissemination Workshop in Skopje, Macedonia on March 19-20, 2013, to present the results of the Social Sustainability Assessment. The Workshop connected officials and citizens from five pilot cities as they shared their findings and learned from each other about their common challenges.

Carried out jointly by I2UD and Co-PLAN on behalf of the World Bank, the objective of the Assessment was to gauge the level of accountability of local governments towards vulnerable groups. Through a participatory approach involving focus groups, interviews and scenario development workshops, city research teams gathered stakeholders to evaluate the main communication challenges between local authorities and citizens. Stakeholders also developed potential solutions which different actors could embrace and commit to that would improve communication between government and citizens, particularly the vulnerable. During the Regional Dissemination Workshop, the city teams presented the results of the assessment and their proposals. They then worked together to review their proposals based on the experiences and lessons learned from other cities. As the lead authors of the Assessment for the I2UD, John Driscoll and Carolina Morgan attended the Workshop, presenting the results of the Assessment as well as introducing the concepts of ICT and social accountability.


The theme of the workshop was the Social Accountability Framework developed by the study team. The three pillars of participation, transparency and feedback/monitoring anchored the challenges and solutions discussed. Three stakeholder groups – local authorities, citizens and intermediaries such as NGOs – were considered key actors in the development and implementation of the proposals, leading to a sense of ownership that was evident during the workshop. The city teams that participated in the Assessment process and the Regional Workshop comprised of representatives of the three stakeholder groups.

Workshop participants were especially enthusiastic about bringing Social Accountability into the discussion in their cities - something they said had not been done before except for isolated projects. They indicated the need to make social accountability initiatives part of the cities’ overall development strategy, and were inspired by other cities’ proposals and the best practices presented at the workshop.

The Social Sustainability Assessment was carried out by the Institute for International Urban Development (www.i2ud.org), Co-PLAN Institute for Habitat Development (www.co-plan.org), the Coalition for Sustainable Development (CSD), Archis Intervention Prishtina, and the US Alumni Association in Bosnia and Herzegovina This assessment is part of the World Bank’s Europe and Central Asia (ECA) Sustainable Cities Initiative financed by the Austria Partnership Program for Strengthening Local Governments in South-Eastern-Europe countries and managed by the ECA Social Development and ECA Urban Development departments and the World Bank Institute. For more information, please refer to the ECA Sustainable Cities Website: http://bit.ly/XWFMCG. The analysis, results, and views expressed in these documents are those of the authors alone and do not represent the position of the World Bank or any of its member countries.