Strategic Engagement with Public Institutions | Political Process Monitoring

Monitoring is done to improve governance by improving a specific political process. Decisions for improvements are made by public officials, typically those who manage the target political process. Evidence from the monitoring report most likely will not be enough to move decision-makers into action. Your organization should be prepared to meet with the stakeholders of the targeted institution to persuade them to consider your findings and recommendations.

The subjects of any political process monitoring are political actors with various political interests. The interests and views of civil society and political actors may very likely collide at points during the course of the monitoring initiative, and public officials can oppose monitoring efforts if the interventions and recommendations challenge their interests and negatively expose governing failures. As such, building trust and proper relations with public officials is an essential part of any monitoring initiative. Be prepared to strategically engage public officials and institutions during the course of the monitoring initiative so that relations do not become adversarial to the point of shutting down communication and closing groups off from a process.

Officials and institutions have a public responsibility to be accountable and open to the public. But the way you approach them and the way you communicate findings and seek changes play a big role in how effective you will be in changing behaviors and influencing the decisions of public officials.

Engagement at Entry Points

In any political process monitoring, you will need access to institutions, officials, public information and documents, official meetings, and meetings with public officials. This is usually the first step to engaging public officials.

Civic groups that conduct parliamentary monitoring need access to parliamentary sessions and, possibly, committee meetings as well as access to draft legislation and supporting documents, legislative agendas, and MP’s questions to the government. Some parliamentary monitoring organizations also employ surveys with MPs as their monitoring method, which requires access to MPs. Groups monitoring follow-through of a government program need access to plans and decisions of such a program, as do groups that monitor for shadow reporting. Budget monitoring groups depend on accessing decisions on the budget process, budget documents and expenditure reports. Even campaign monitoring requires access to information and candidates for pre- and post-election periods.

In some contexts that lack right-to-information acts or have closed institutions and processes, access to information and meetings is left to the discretion and willingness of public officials. However, even if this access is regulated and considerably open, its implementation can depend on the public officials and public administration of the institution in charge of the process you are interested in monitoring.

Considering this, you must be strategic about engaging public institutions and public officials to gain access to your target process, alongside studying the legislation that regulates access to information and public institutions.

	Access to public information	Access to official meetings	Access to public officials
Campaign-related Monitoring	Candidate platforms (pre-election) Executive decisions (post-election) Government plans (post-election)	Candidate platforms (pre-election)	Candidates Political party leaders
Parliamentary Monitoring	Legislative agenda MP votes Draft laws	Plenary sessions Committee meetings Oversight hearings	Speaker of Parliament Secretary General of Parliament Committee Chairs
Government Follow-Through	Government plans Executive decisions	Working group meetings	Heads of Departments; Ministries
Budget Monitoring and Expenditure Tracking	Budget statements Draft budgets Budget requests Expenditure reports Citizen budgets	Working group meetings Parliamentary committee meetings	Minister of Finance (national) Department of Finance (local) Committee Finance Chair
Shadow Reporting	Government plans Executive decisions	Working group meetings	Heads of Departments; Ministries

Engagement at Intervention Points

Gaining access to public institutions goes a long way to ease monitoring efforts. But political process monitoring is a way to a means. Over the course of your monitoring activity, you will run into government actions, or lack thereof, that require interventions on your part to advance your goals. This involves engaging public officials politically to change actions, behaviors and practices.

Monitoring activities can expose fallacies in an institutional process that may be quite sensitive to public officials. Poor performance, lack of progress, mismanagement of public resources and corruption activity need intervention to correct. Naturally, this intervention has to come after monitoring activities mount sufficient evidence. But these are sensitive matters, and civic intervention in such issues requires careful engagement with public officials. Simply pointing out such practices identified during monitoring often does not yield meaningful results. Thus, you will have to engage in a more public debate with public officials and even follow their monitoring with advocacy campaigns.

Issue-based groups monitoring a government process may have goals that call for influencing a policy. Thus, after some monitoring, you will come to a point in the process when you will have to engage institutions in influencing policy.

Monitoring activities can be beneficial to groups seeking interventions in governance and policy, as it presents an opportunity to build relationships and trust with public officials. Nevertheless, protecting the objectivity of monitoring and the political independence of the civic group in monitoring is crucial to earn the respect of the target institution and public credibility.

Building Relations and Safeguarding Impartiality

Power-mapping exercises are also important for you to identify entry points for your monitoring. When it is difficult to access information, documents and institutions, you must find entry points among “supporters” or champions of open government within institutions to begin your monitoring. Using those entry points, you can begin to use your monitoring techniques to promote open governance.

Monitoring in order to open government involves relationship-building with target institutions and officials leading those institutions. Once some trust is built among the civic groups and the public institutions, those institutions eventually will move toward openness. Very rarely do institutions move toward closing down space, and only when public officials become hostile to civic involvement or media coverage. You must be careful to avoid such situations but also be prepared to use public pressure if it occurs. The best way to prevent closed governance and move toward greater openness is by gaining the trust of the institutions in the notion that monitoring efforts contribute to better governance and the institution’s improved performance.

One of the most common ways that civic groups build relationships with public institutions is by agreeing on a memorandum of understanding (MoU) when a monitoring initiative is undertaken. This is very common for a parliamentary monitoring initiative or monitoring a government program that is about to go into implementation. Even monitoring through “social audits” should seek formal support of public institutions, as they can help improve public contract management. Such MoUs between an institution and a civic group usually involve the institution guaranteeing that the civic group gets access to documents, meetings and other public gatherings, whereas the civic group guarantees political impartiality, agreeing not to damage the institution or the process with baseless criticism, and committing to offer constructive recommendations. Finding entry points and supporters within the system can be crucial to push through such MoUs.

While building relations with public institutions is important in civic monitoring, it is challenging to protect impartiality and objectivity in the process. Public officials are very concerned with their reputation and their perceived performance, and monitoring and detailed coverage of their work could be seen as threatening. That is why so often civic groups that do monitoring are labeled as working for some other force (opposition parties, someone’s agendas or even foreign agencies). Thus, public officials may want to influence or condition a civic group to allow space for monitoring only if they are portrayed favorably in performance.

It is important to note that the single most important trait a civic monitoring group can have is credibility. If a monitoring group loses credibility with the public, media or public officials because they may seem subjective to political influence, it is difficult for them to be taken seriously or have any positive effect in the long term. Maintaining impartiality and credibility to the monitoring goals can be difficult, especially where laws do not guarantee access to public information and groups rely on the discretion of public officials. In such cases, power mapping, strategic engagement of public officials, and time and patience become even more important.

Evaluating Risks in Authoritative and Semi-Authoritative Societies

Political process monitoring initiatives provide citizens with a mechanism to promote accountability and increase transparency of government actions. Ideally, monitoring government action should be a regular part of civil society’s role in the political process. However, in countries where political space is limited or closing, civil society oversight activities may appear threatening to those in power. Consequently, access to information may be limited and society’s ability to monitor government action is hampered, which may result in physical threats or detentions. In these contexts, risks need to be closely considered and managed. You need to become adept at protecting and maximizing the small amounts of political space available. In some instances, monitoring can be a way to expand political space and raise the voice of civil society in a meaningful way. When space is limited to monitor and hold government accountable, working in a network or coalition may be beneficial, as there is safety in numbers, and leveraging existing relationships is key to overcoming challenges of access to information and to disseminating findings.