Abstract

Governments around the world are investing in technologies that allow citizens to participate in the coproduction of public services by providing monitoring and feedback, but there is little evidence about how these initiatives affect the quality of public services. We implemented a large-scale field experiment that involved organizing 50 citizen reporters in each of 100 neighborhoods across Kampala, Uganda, to provide weekly reports to the municipal government about the delivery of solid waste services via an SMS-messaging platform, resulting in 23,856 reports during the 9-month study period. Citizen reporting did not reduce informal waste accumulation as targeted, which would indicate improvements to formal services. Using our observations as participants in the development and deployment of the reporting platform and interviews with staff at the government agency receiving the citizen reports, we show how the public generated inconsistent information that did not fit existing decision-making processes. We generalize lessons from this field experiment by explaining how coproduction involving information sharing through information and communication technologies is likely to affect public services based on the alignment of citizen-produced data with the information problems managers face; the search costs of detecting public services failures; the quality of citizen-produced data; and the operating costs of citizen-reporting platforms.

中文翻译：

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利用公民报告改善公共服务的挑战：乌干达固体废物服务实地试验

摘要

世界各地的政府都在投资技术，以通过提供监视和反馈使公民参与公共服务的共同生产，但是很少有证据表明这些举措如何影响公共服务的质量。我们实施了一项大规模的现场实验，其中涉及在乌干达坎帕拉的100个社区中，每个社区组织50名公民记者，以通过SMS短信平台向市政府提供有关固体废物服务交付的每周报告，从而产生23,856份报告在9个月的学习期间。公民报告并未减少非正规废物的累积量，这表明对正规服务的改善。使用我们的观察结果作为报告平台开发和部署的参与者，以及与接受公民报告的政府机构工作人员的访谈，我们展示了公众如何产生不一致的信息，这些信息不适合现有的决策流程。我们通过解释涉及通过信息和通信技术共享信息的联合生产可能会如何影响公共服务来总结本次实地实验的经验教训。对准与管理者面临的信息问题公民产生的数据; 发现公共服务故障的搜索成本；公民生产的数据的质量；以及公民报告平台的运营成本。