| The World Bank has gained a better understanding of the substantive role and increased legitimacy that civic engagement can contribute to development. Scaling up requires an assessment of the kinds of operations and the degree to which civic engagement is feasible. The Bank participates in several activities in which citizens can potentially engage, including community-driven development (CDD), Country Assistance Strategies (CAS-es), Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), structural adjustment policy and investment projects. Operationally, the most progress has been made in community and sectoral projects, while civic engagement in governance and policy dialogue has lagged. In particular, consultations on CAS-es/PRSPs have been limited to general goals (e.g., setting priorities), and have not focused on substantive decisions about options, trade-offs, costs and risks. World Bank programs that directly involve civic engagement fall into three broad areas. Moving from the least to the most intensive, these include: Information dissemination: Provision of information is a precondition to citizens’ empowerment and public participation. The World Bank has made important strides in developing a consistent information disclosure policy that makes our operations more transparent. Effective civic engagement requires that information be provided in a timely way, and in language that is easily understood by the target audience. Consultation: Providing a voice and listening to those who are supposed to benefit from World Bank-financed projects and reforms is essential for “getting the design right,” for mobilizing public support for implementation, and for ensuring that the project or reform is sustainable over time. Public consultations need not be confined to Bank-supported projects. The Bank has invested much effort in soliciting perspectives from citizens on sector strategies and Country Assistance Strategies (CAS-es). Participation: The most intense form of engagement is the active participation of stakeholders in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of World Bank-financed activities. This is the area in which we have least experience and where the issues are the most complex, but also where the potential development benefits are greatest. Although they are government products, PRSPs increasingly include innovative participatory approaches. Other advances include macroeconomic work that incorporates participatory monitoring mechanisms into policy-based lending. Apart from the three areas outlined above, the Bank can also play a critical (indirect) role in facilitating interactions between civil society and the state. As indicated in section 4.2, while the Bank is poorly equipped in terms of direct financing of CSO capacity building, its convening power can create space for civil society and CSOs as recognized actors in the development process, and make local political elites and the media aware of their potential. The costs of civic engagement can be significant for both governments and CSOs. Engaging primary and secondary stakeholders can be resource and time-intensive. For the Bank, consultations and other mechanisms of participation can introduce new tensions, such as competition among stakeholders with different interests, or raise expectations which cannot be met by the government or by the specific project or task at hand. Yet, most development agencies note that the benefits of participation outweigh the costs.
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