The Public Service Commission’s (PSC) constitutional mandate includes the following values and principles:

• The efficient and effective use of resources
• Impartial, fair, equal and unbiased provision of services
• Responding to peoples’ needs and encouraging the public to participate in policy-making

In line with this mandate, during 1999/2000, the Commission undertook a review of the implementation of government’s Batho Pele policy. This survey focused on departments and their efforts to promote people centred development and service delivery, in line with the eight principles of Batho Pele. The survey yielded some positive results, but indicated that there is still much work to be done. At the same time, the focus on departments meant that the views of citizens were not heard.

Accordingly, the Commission decided to develop tools and methodologies to incorporate the views and perceptions of citizens in its analysis of Batho Pele implementation. During 2001/2002, a national customer satisfaction survey will be undertaken. At the same time, the PSC has considered methodologies that will enhance and complement the customer satisfaction survey. One such consideration has been the implementation of citizens’ juries. Research on citizens’ juries has revealed that this is a comprehensive public engagement technique that has been used with varying success in Germany, UK, USA and Australia. It is a process that allows decision-makers to establish the views of citizens by setting up juries consisting of members who are randomly selected and stratified to ensure representativeness. Juries sit for up to a week, listening to the views of expert witnesses. The process is outsourced and conducted by private institutions to avoid subjectivity and bias.

Other approaches have been considered based on particular understandings of the public sphere, which allow people to participate with governments in defining social needs and making choices through a process of democratic public action. Such approaches have been developed in countries like Nicaragua and India, particularly in the state of Kerala, where accountability was built into systems of governance through mechanisms such as political organization and struggle on a large scale to increase participation and access to services, as well as through local activity aimed at mass service delivery institutions, to ensure that once set up, they functioned as expected. The success of government action in Kerala, which enjoys impressive education and public health systems, has been largely predicated on popular participation.

Given the rich tradition of popular participation in South Africa, the PSC has proposed that the findings of the national customer satisfaction survey will be better complemented by citizens’ forums for service delivery improvement, than by citizens’ juries, which do not allow for significant participation.

The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration has also prioritized service delivery for 2001/2002, and a decision has been taken that the two oversight bodies should collaborate in evaluating and developing mechanisms to improve service delivery. Both bodies are interested in developing South Africa’s traditions of public participation for the purposes of improving service delivery, and consensus has been reached to implement citizens’ forums. This is a unique development, whereby institutions independent of the executive will participate jointly with citizens in proposing practical measures to improve service delivery and contribute towards the consolidation of government’s people centred development programme.

The objective of the project is to evaluate the delivery of particular services throughout the country, and to facilitate the active involvement of people affected by government programmes in service delivery improvement processes.

The project aims to demonstrate the responsivity of government to the needs of citizens, and the role that oversight bodies can play in this. It is also anticipated that the project will facilitate service delivery improvement, and that it will promote the effective and efficient use of public resources. Furthermore, this project will give effect to the constitutional right to access of information and increased public participation as envisaged in Section 195.

There are a wide variety of mechanisms of public participation, which may appear to be synonymous, but in reality cover a range of levels of participation and engagement. Participatory techniques seek to inform, consult and empower citizens, and they achieve this in different ways. Public participation is an educational and empowering process in which people, in partnership with each other and with organized formations able to assist, discuss identified problems and needs in order to develop collective recommendations for decision-making by authorities. The strength of public or popular participation is that it provides opportunities for citizens to learn more about issues that affect their lives, and deliberate collectively in order to find the best solution.

Public participation is educational insofar as it entails a multidirectional flow of knowledge through interactions between individuals, groups and institutions, including those of the state. It is empowering because people gain experience in improving their living conditions through active interaction with social experts, state employees and their own initiative to establish individual and collective action. It is a process whereby people begin from the standpoint of their own local knowledge, and develop their own knowledge in order to make informed contributions. Public participation is time-consuming, but it can lead to transformations that endure. It must also entail a partnership between individuals working together as a group, and between the group and change agents working with it.

An agreed methodology for implementing a programme of citizens’ forums for service delivery improvement, must take cognizance of the limited capacity of both the PSC and the Portfolio Committee for Public Service and Administration. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the Office of the PSC does have a cadre of professionals in place with a capacity to process and analyze information. South Africa is a huge country with nine provinces broken down into a multitude of districts and localities where a wide variety of service delivery takes place. Taking these limitations into consideration, the following is proposed:

• Citizens’ forums will be chaired and facilitated by Public Service Commissioners. Forum panels will be set up to include Portfolio Committee members, Commissioners as well as departmental officials and/or experts on the services under discussion. In cases where Portfolio Committee members are busy with parliamentary work, Commissioners will ensure that the project progresses.
• The coverage should be national and countrywide, but it should not be assumed that all nine provinces shall be equally covered. Sites will need to be identified, taking into consideration development priorities as set by various cabinet clusters. The choice of sites will need to be sensitive to the urban/rural divide, but it should be recognized that facilities for conducting forums may not be in place in many rural areas. In order to avoid an urban bias in the process, it may be necessary to conduct specific rural site visits by members of the Portfolio Committee and Public Service Commissioners.
• A decision will need to be taken about which services are to be evaluated and where. It will not be possible to cover all services and their delivery, as this will lead to thin and patchy information, which will be very difficult to analyze. Once decisions have been taken about which services and departments will be covered and which localities will be visited, engagements need to take place between the Commission and Portfolio Committee and the executive, including the relevant cabinet members, MECs, local government EXCO members and Departmental heads.
• Once sites and services to be evaluated have been decided upon, newspaper, radio and other appropriate advertisements will be run, inviting key stakeholders to participate in the evaluation and improvement of specific services in their localities. These advertisements will need to indicate where and when particular meetings will take place, and by when written submissions or bookings to make oral inputs will need to have been forward to the secretariat. Organized formations will be encouraged to participate, but individuals will be free to participate.
• Once convened, the forums will invite submissions to be made. While critical input on government services should be allowed, the emphasis must be on concrete recommendations pertaining to the improvement of services, as well as how these improvements can be sustained through ongoing active involvement of citizens where appropriate. Once in session, the forums must avoid becoming a series of public hearings, but must be chaired and facilitated in such a manner that allows interactions between the key stakeholders, including the government departments that deliver the services under review. Public meetings will either be preceded by or followed by site visits to service delivery points to get feedback from citizens, thereby completing the participation loop.
• The Office of the PSC will collate and analyze the discussions and inputs at the forums, and package the reports in a manner in which key recommendations for service delivery improvement are highlighted. A monitoring system will be put in pace to determine the extent to which recommendations are implemented, by the departments concerned.
• It is recommended that in 2001/2002, a modest sample of sites be selected in order to pilot the programme and refine the methodology.

Stemming from the underlying issues discussed above, this section spells out the practical steps, which need to be taken in order to implement the project. In the long term, it is envisaged that several provincial Departments will be visited. It is proposed, however, that an initial pilot be undertaken in departments located within the social sector. This sector is comprised of the Departments of Health, Welfare and Education, and is the most logical choice given the fact that it represents the "Face of Government". In other words, these Departments’ respective core businesses constitute the Government’s domestic agenda and therefore have the most impact on the local populace. Citizens from all walks of life are thereby in a position to give informed input based on personal experience.

During the pilot phase, it is proposed that the Departments of Health, Education, and Welfare be tackled in three Provinces. The designated Provinces will be Mpumalanga, Kwazulu-Natal, and the Eastern Cape. The focus in Mpumalanga will be on the area of health as the Commission is presently involved in an investigation on the disappearance of medicines. This in many instances has contributed to the outward flow of patients from Mpumalanga to other provinces, resulting in intense pressure on existing and limited resources. The focus in Kwazulu-Natal will be on Education as the Commission has been involved in investigations that point to maladministration of grave proportions. The problems of the Welfare Department in the Eastern Cape have been extensively documented in the media and they do point to a need for a systematic and thorough-going evaluation. Not only are these Departments central to improving the quality of life and human resources, but they also face the same challenges in terms of backlogs and inequities they have inherited from the past. The problems experienced by these Departments in terms of service delivery are a constant feature in the popular press and it would seem that they all have some way to go in delivering services in a manner congruent with the recipients’ expectations. It would seem that they are the hardest hit Provinces in as far as disparities in the three Departments are concerned, while at the same time constrained by their very meager resources. They also embody the desirable mix of rural, metropolitan, and peri-urban areas, which will also enable intra-Provincial comparisons to be made.

During the pilot study, the parties involved will be afforded the opportunity to become acquainted with the methodology and to learn from mistakes made, which should improve the quality of the studies in other Departments and Provinces in subsequent interventions. Each workshop will be conducted over a three day period per site, i.e. one day in an urban setting, one day in a rural setting, and the last one in a peri-urban setting. This will mean a total of three days per Province. In cases where rural areas are either inaccessible or a meeting is not feasible, it is proposed that "spot visits" be conducted to get a sense of what some of the issues are. The outcome will therefore be a comprehensive assessment that covers all the niches.

Experience has shown that workshops are not effective when uncontrolled numbers of participants are invited. It would therefore be prudent to limit the number of participants to no more than 100. It is the intention to invite interested individuals who will represent certain stakeholders, by means of advertisements and the radio to attend the workshops. Commissioners will need to chair the proceedings sensitively, as emotions may run high from time to time. After the workshops, reports will be prepared by the Office and distributed to all stakeholders.

The table below details the sequence of activities for project implementation.

It is proposed that all provinces be revisited two years after the completion of workshops to gauge the success (if any) of service delivery improvements initiated by the Department. All members of the Security Services Directorate will attend all the workshops to handle logistical and administrative issues.

Public participation has the potential to make a positive impact on service delivery, but also carries several risks, which need to be tightly managed. These include:

• The size of the group involved in the forum becomes too large to manage. In such cases, individuals attending the meeting may elect to disrupt the process. By the same token, the debate may become dominated by powerful groups or individuals, thus undermining genuine participation.
• The forums become complaints sessions, with individuals trying to impress upon the members of the Portfolio Committee and Commissioners that government only imposes programmes that are detrimental to their interests.
• Forums are convened in areas where communities are not cohesive, leading to lack of cooperation, particularly when it comes to implementation of decisions that require further community input.
• In certain areas, there may be minimal interest in participation, and little inclination to abide by community consensus.
• Even if forum meetings are properly advertised and canvassed, this is no guarantee that appropriate individuals will respond and attend.
• Participative processes may be highly successful in one area or context, but in another, they may be unsuccessful.
• The greatest risk is that the forums will raise expectations unrealistically, not around service delivery improvement, but around the extension or introduction of new services, which the process does not set out to achieve.

A risk management framework for the project must be developed and become part and parcel of the project management and monitoring system.

Public participation must be action oriented in order to achieve its objectives. It should not be seen as a good public relations exercise aimed at dissemination of information. It aims to open up government to the general public to allow for active interaction in the process of policy and service delivery improvement. Democratic public action allows people at the grass-root level to become the initiators of change, rather than the passive recipients of change. If handled correctly, this approach of interaction between government and the people has the potential of ensuring sustainable social and economic transformation. In order to avoid generating unnecessary popular expectations, the drivers of the process must indicate clearly to the participants what the process can achieve, and what it cannot.