GovTech: Putting People First

As economies and societies become increasingly digital, governments around the World are prioritizing the use of digital technologies and data to increase the participation and engagement of civil society in public matters. At the same time, citizen’s rising expectations and demands require public sectors to strengthen civil society engagement. Digital technologies and data have the potential to increase substantially the tools that governments have available to further involve citizens in policy and service design and delivery. This how-to-note provides advice on how to use digitalization to strengthen the engagement between the governments and citizens, with various examples of what CivicTech is and why it is an important element of the GovTech approach.

The recent rapid evolution of digital technologies has been changing behaviors and expectations in countries around the world. These shifts make it the right time to pose the key question this study explores: Will digital technologies, both those that are already widespread and those that are still emerging, have substantial impacts on the way citizens engage and the ways through which power is sought, used, or contested?  This study explores what technology might mean for engagement, makes predictions, and offers measures for governments to consider.

This set of reports and tools was developed as part of a new initiative led by Results for Development (R4D) and supported by the World Bank, to contribute new evidence to this field. The tool can be adapted and used to estimate the costs of a variety of open government programs in different countries.

The objective of this strategic framework is to mainstream citizen engagement in World Bank Group (WBG)-supported policies, programs, projects, and advisory services and analytics to improve their development results and within the scope of these operations, contribute to building sustainable national systems for citizen engagement with governments and the private sector. 

This publication fills an important knowledge gap by providing guidance on how to assess contextual drivers of social accountability effectiveness. It aims to strategically support citizen engagement at the country level and for a specific issue or problem. The report proposes a novel framing of social accountability as the interplay of constitutive elements: citizen action and state action, supported by three enabling levers: civic mobilization, interface and information.

This evaluation assesses how effectively the World Bank Group has mainstreamed citizen engagement at the project, country, and corporate levels, and demonstrates how this process contributes to the achievement of development outcomes.