IS LOCAL GOVERNABILITY PROGRESSING IN DOMINICAN REPUBLIC?

The challenges faced by Dominican local governments require a greater concertation and determination of central, local and civil society powers.

Author: Alice Auradou

The lack of transparency during the administration of scarce public funds by the Dominican local governments, associated to the breach in fulfilling regulations and procedures, a phantom autonomy, expenses influenced by clientelism and deficient or poor services delivered to the citizenship, naturally lead to dissatisfaction and citizenship’s mistrust towards the elected authorities.

The PASCAL Programme [1] to which the European Union decided to dedicate around 1000 Millions of Dominican pesos through combined efforts and responsibilities from different sectors – dozens of entities from central public administration, local government and civil society organizations – was aimed to tackle this vicious circle.

As a part of the strategy to reverse this situation that puts in danger the governability and the Rule of Law in its broadest sense, the SISMAP Municipal has been launched at the beginning of 2015, and became rapidly the Dominican State’s official system to stimulate the transparency and a better management of the municipal public affairs.

In addition to other virtues of the system, such as the identification of inconsistencies in the legal framework applied to local governments and the confirmation of the required decentralized action of Central Government out of the capital to improve the quality of public expense in territories of life, the SISMAP Municipal showed its effectiveness to raise the levels of transparency and basic management of Local Governments.

Based on the measurements of a set of indicators, the system not only monitors states of situations as an audit, but also allows coordinating inter-institutional actions of central government’s entities that facilitate the correction of practices and the identification of structural breaches requiring agreements and common actions based on shared responsibilities: local governments, central government and citizens. An example can be the implementation of an administrative race system among local governments, monitoring the improvement of the services provided to the population (recollection and final disposition of solid wasted, safe and clean public spaces, funeral services, etc.)

Thanks to SISMAP Municipal, Local Governments are publicly classified according to a ranking and accede to an additional funding as a prize that can be destined to improve the infrastructure or equipment of some service. The citizenship has greater facilities to exercise social control of the management, be involved into the administration of its municipality’s development and take care of the public sector and common good. And the central government’s entities concerned know the limits of their own actions as well as the rules the Dominican municipalities is trying to impose for decades without success for being sometimes inapplicable.

However, even if the SISMAP Municipal encourages local governments to base their management on socially acceptable minimum standards of transparency, it doesn’t solve the main issue and what is expected by the governed population: quality services to people, independently from their sex, religion, sexual orientation or from their “political color”. Unfortunately the Dominican local governments don’t have at present enough resources or autonomy, nor sufficient legitimacy and citizen support, to solve the multiple issues and fulfill the needs of the population, even the most basic.

The central government, which has the resources required, is mistrusted by local governments and conditioned by its centralism, lacking in a decentralized operative structure that would facilitate the connection and coordination with municipalities.

The national territory presents serious discrepancies reflected by the Unsatisfied Basic Needs [2] map and by the opportunities of the population. These mismatches and the extent of the problems require going beyond the supportive or trade functioning, that can be occasional or periodic. These discrepancies require inclusive public policies, added to conducts – from the ruling class – detached from clientelism. These discrepancies can be fixed with services delivered to the population that answer to their expectations, with a well balanced “value for money”, for which collaborative citizens’ conducts are not required. Presently, the (poor) quality of services justifies the existing complaints and resistances of the Dominican society to pay for services. While this vicious circle won’t disappear, thanks to the determination and constructive collaboration between central government, local governments and civil society, we will witness deficient services, high levels of citizen mistrust and low governability.

To reverse this vicious circle, it is required in first instance that the political will – widely expressed in press conferences and agreements of good intentions – demonstrates itself through a change of attitude perceived as such by the population and reflected by an improvement of services. This first movement is a responsibility of the governing sphere, and is essential to raise a collaborative awareness within the society as well as attitudes of care, protection and valorization of the public sector through their daily actions, including the payment for services. Following these steps, it will finally be possible to undertake a virtuous dynamic of services’ improvement as a whole, raising the citizen satisfaction, governability and welfare state of the Dominican population.

This post has been written for the Blog Society Gov: http://www.societygov.org/en/2017/04/19/is-local-governability-progress…

[1] Support Programme to Local Authorities and Civil Society

[2] Published by the Ministry of Economy, Planning and Development.