Background

Governance is the lynchpin to achieving the 2030 Agenda and thus it is critical to accelerate attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Various strategic documents such as the Rectangular Strategy Phase IV, United Nations Development Assistance Framework, and UNDP Country Programme Document informed that development challenges concerning ‘Peace’ of the 2030 Agenda include obstacles to participate effectively in development and public institutions, limited performance in transparency and responsiveness to the public, and lack of trust from the people in public services. Limited accountabilities and many remaining challenges in public sector reforms are identified as a part of the causes of the challenges.

The project will address limited accountability and many remaining challenges in public sector reform by supporting the Sub-National Democratic Development reform. The National Programme on Sub-National Democratic Development Phase II (2021-2030) identifies the following key challenges that are relevant to the project:

• Vertical accountability and trust among National – Sub-National Administrations (SNA) -People

• People’s knowledge about their rights and how to hold SNA councils and SNA accountable

• Mainstreaming of cross-cutting issues such as digital governance, climate change, gender equality and social equality and inclusiveness

• Monitoring and reporting of Cambodia’s Sustainable Development Goals at the sub-national level

Key Expected Outputs

The project directly contributes to the National Plan on Sub-National Democratic Development Phase II and UNDAF Outcome 4/ UNDP Country Programme Document Outcome 3: By 2023, women and men, including those underrepresented, marginalized and vulnerable, benefit from more transparent and accountable legislative and governance frameworks that ensure meaningful and informed participation in economic and social development and political processes.

The project’s two outputs are as follows:

Output 1: Women and men, including the under-represented, marginalized, and vulnerable have more accessible information, especially on local services, development projects and rights to hold SNA accountable in three provinces.

• Activity 1.1: Making local governance information such as public services, local plans, budget allocations and SNA’s performance more accessible to people

• Activity 1.2:  Provide media, Information, digital literacy training

Output 2: Women and men, including the under-represented, marginalized, and vulnerable have more opportunities and increased capacity to express their needs in local planning and monitoring.

• Activity 2.1: Support people’s monitoring of SNA performance through the governance survey and collective intelligence platform

• Activity 2.2: Empower civil society organizations to advocate in policy making, SNA planning and budgeting

Target municipalities include Kampong Cham (Kampong Cham Province), Banlung (Ratanakiri Province) and Siem Reap (Siem Reap Province).

Progress (as of December 2022)

The project commenced on 1 October 2022. 

A partnership with Nesta was formalized in November 2022 and the partnership agreements with CPDD and NCDD-S are being prepared and expected to finalize in early Q1 2023.

The discovery research with Nesta in designing collective intelligence platform for SNA’s performance monitoring identified 21 insights on how citizens use and feedback on SNA services and their experience, people’s behaviour and attitude towards SNAs and CSOs, any barriers and opportunity to give feedback, and technical literacy and technology behaviour.  The insights informed 12 design opportunities for the first prototype of SNA performance monitoring, which will be available in Q1 2023. 

Impact