Introduction

Vietnam’s move from a highly centralized hierarchical state, designed for central planning, towards a more nimble set of arrangements suited for markets, has included the decentralization of responsibilities and power to lower levels of government.With about 55% of the overall state expenditures and 75% of capital expenditures done at the sub-national level (World Bank, 2014), Vietnam is comparatively ahighly decentralized country. While devolving responsibilities and autonomy to local actors has been crucial in unleashing economic development, it also poses a fundamental problem: how can accountability be assured after devolution? These two fundamental elements of any effective decentralization cannot be separated, but accountability does not automatically come with more devolution. On the contrary, accountability needs to be carefully and consciously created, both upwards and downwards. While upward accountability has always been part of the traditional governance model of Vietnam, downward accountability is also needed for the system to work effectively. The defining features of upward accountability are hierarchy and administrative rewards and sanctions, and the defining features of downward accountability are feedback from citizens, information for citizens and participation in decision-making (World Bank, 2010).

The legal and organizational system for citizens’ consultation exists…

Participation and citizens’ involvement has been part of the Vietnamese government system for a long time. This participation can be summarized in the two familiar slogans of‘People know, people discuss, people do, and people monitor’, and ‘Government of the people, by the people, and for the people’. These two sentences probably best describe what is commonly understood as democracy in the Vietnamese context. According to Article 6of the 2013 Constitution, ‘the people shall exercise state power through direct democracy and through representative democracy in the National  Assembly, People's Councils and other state agencies’ (Oxfam-UNDP, 2015). The main channels for citizens’ consultations are the People’s Councils and mass organizations. Article 119 of the Vietnam Constitution states that ‘the People’s Council is the local organ of State power; it represents the will, aspirations, and mastery of the people; it is elected by the local people and is accountable to them and to the superior State organs.’ People’s Councils at all levels are legally obliged to regularly meet their constituencies. The Communist Party and the Government of Vietnam have also been promoting consultation, dialogue, and other interaction with a range of civil society organizations (CSOs). But the main channel of communication and consultation between the government and the citizens are the mass organisations.  In article 9 of the Constitution, the function of ‘social supervision and criticism’ is assigned to the Viet Nam Fatherland Front (umbrella organisations of mass organisations).Mass organisations maintain large memberships (Women’s Union - 12 million; Farmers’ association – 8 million; General Federation of Trade Union – 4.2 million; Youth Union – 5.1 million; Veterans’ Association – 1.92 million) operating through extensive bureaucratic structures at central, provincial, district and local levels and continue to play a dominant role in civic life in Vietnam. In addition, Vietnam also has a wider range of legal documents pertaining to consultations of citizens ranging from the 2013 Constitution to the Grassroots Democracy Ordinance through the new Law on Local Government of 2015.

… but requires adequate and efficient implementation and enforcement

Despite a large legal and organizational framework for consultations with citizens, the implementation of legal rights to participation often lags behind the letter of the law (Oxfam-UNDP, 2015).Citizens’ consultations are very often formalistic, bureaucratic and one-way communication (from State to citizens). Mass organisations often ‘do not contact the people before they go and represent them’ (UNDP, 2006). Citizens are perceived not to be interested and/or able to participate.Local authorities sometimes feel trapped between the legal obligation of consultations and the lack of interests of citizens. Citizens are said to be interested only in issues directly impacting their life, but not in policy or governance issues (Dak Ha district chairmen, Kon Tum province).The law prescribes that citizen should monitor local government performance through vertical accountability structures, forming the lowest level of direct participation, with People’s Inspection  Boards (PIBs) and Community Investment Supervision Boards (CISBs). In practice, those boards are often not functioning as designed and their members lack the necessary basic skills to be in a position to efficiently fulfill their mandates.The law also prescribes that citizens should be involved in the budget process and that the local budget should be published and made available for citizens’ information and comments. In practice, the communal budget is at best stapled at the door of the people’s committee in a hardly understandable and accessible format, complicating possible valuable feedback.The Grassroots Democracy Ordinance mentions that citizens’ consultation meetings should take place regularly. People’s Councils also organize regular meetings with their constituencies. However, it appears that those meetings are usually a one-way communication channel from the authorities to the citizens, but hardly organized in a way to facilitate citizens’ involvement. In addition, much participation in meetings is seen as superficial and nominal.While participation in decision-making does exist, it often focuses more on implementing what has already been decided, thereby removing the impact but also with time, the interests of the citizens to take part in such exercises.In Vietnam, like in many countries, citizens’ demand for participation, but also transparency and accountability from local government is growing. As Vietnam and its citizens become wealthier, it is clear that the pressure to further improve public services will not ease. People want better services, more transparent government, less corruption, and more service-oriented public administration. Accordingly, Vietnam has been piloting many different mechanisms of downward accountability and citizens’ participation, mainly at the grassroots and commune level, while most of the devolution has gone to the province (World Bank, 2010). Bridging those misalignments is therefore important.

Citizens’ feedback

In 2009, UNDP, CECODES (a Vietnamese research center on policy impact assessment) and the Vietnam Fatherland Front started the first Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI). PAPI is the largest national governance and public administration performance monitoring tool in Viet Nam exclusively based on citizens’ experiences.PAPI assesses three mutually reinforcing processes: policy making, policy implementation and the monitoring of public service delivery. The dimensions are specifically tailored to Viet Nam’s national and local contexts. The philosophy behind PAPI’s innovative policy monitoring approach is that citizens are seen as ‘end-users of public administrative services’ capable of assessing governance and public administration in their localities. The end result is Viet Nam’s first publically available dataset providing an objective evaluation of governance from the perspective of citizens. Based on this citizen input, PAPI provides a set of objective indicators that help assess the performance in governance and public administration, while at the same time providing an incentive for provinces to improve their performance over the long term (PAPI, 2015).PAPI is a powerful tool indeed to provide local authorities both with information and incentives to improve their performance. But for many provinces, this is just the beginning of a journey to improve services and move from being an authority to being a service provider to citizens. For many civil servants of Vietnam, this requires a Copernican mind shift that cannot happen overnight. Indeed, while such surveys provide useful information to local government on the perception of the citizens, they are not workable enough to be able to act on it directly and automatically.

Belgium’ support

This is where Belgium comes in. Belgium will support the provinces of Nghe An, Ha Tinh and Kon Tum to improve their responses to citizens’ feedbacks and assessments of their performance. The pressure to improve their PAPI score and quality of services to citizens has made 19 out of 63 provinces of Vietnam to take initiatives to improve their performance based on citizens’ feedback (PAPI, 2015). Kon Tum province, scoring quite low, was one of the first provinces in Vietnam to develop an action plan in 2012. A Belgian cooperation project will take it from those initial plans and support the three provinces in implementing their priorities to improve citizens’ satisfaction. Subsequently, the deeper causes of citizens’lack of satisfaction will be analysed with a view to improve the local government processes and procedures. Belgium’ support could include issues such as disseminating citizen-friendly information to facilitate transparency and accountability (budgets, plans...), support the People’s Council and mass organizations collaboration to facilitate citizen-government interaction, improve citizens’ input into public management on both policy and performance, support innovations and attitudinal changes within local governments, support local government to develop and adopt enabling reforms and procedures in responses to citizens’ feedback etc. The Belgian project will closely collaborate with OXFAM, which will complementarily develop a mobile application for citizens to provide feedback on district-based performance on targeted services (M-Score). This will be used to further refine the assessments and actions plans for government’s response.Through this modest project, Belgium aims to suggest and promote possible changes within the existing political system that would increase voice, transparency and accountability, thereby contributing to improve the quality of the services provided by the government to the citizens.

References

• Vietnam Development Report, 2010. Building Institutions. World Bank
• Andrew Wells-Dang, Le Kim Thai and Nguyen Tran Lam (2015). Between Trust and Structure:  Citizen Participation  and  Local  Elections  in Viet Nam. A Joint Policy Research Paper on Governance and Participation commissioned by Oxfam and UNDP in Viet Nam. Ha Noi, Viet Nam: August 2015
• Deepening Democracy and Increasing Popular Participation in  Viet Nam, commissioned by UNDP and researched by a pair of specialists (McElwee and Ha 2006)
• Public Governance and Administration Performance Index. papi.vn/en
• Making The Whole Greater Than The Sum Of The Parts: A Review of Fiscal Decentralization in Vietnam, World Bank Vietnam, 2014