The STAND process is based on a belief that accountable governance at a local level will only develop in response to an organised and sustained demand. STAND serves as a platform on which informed and focused community-led advocacy establishes the conditions in which resource allocation becomes increasingly transparent and service delivery improves.

For community-led advocacy to be effective, communities have to be united around a clear set of priorities. Therefore, conflict transformation and needs assessment are important initial elements of the STAND process. Communities also need to be informed and able to deploy information persuasively. Facilitating access to information and sharing advocacy skills are core components of the STAND process.

Despite challenges, communities grow in confidence at their successes and in experience by creating advocacy campaigns. Networking communities is essential to the development of a robust demand-side transparency and accountability platform. STAND encourages communities to move beyond advocacy that demands particular 'products' of government towards advocacy focused on transforming the process of governance.

Lessons:

  1. Engagement is not guaranteed
  2. Government sees no value in engagement
  3. Lack of transparency at all levels
  4. Community confidence is critical
  5. Advocacy works despite patronage
  6. Democratisation is crucial

Lesson 1

The willingness of State and Local Governments to engage on reform cannot be assumed
  • Windows for engagement with government institutions and representatives are small. Focused advocacy and some skills in engagement are critical
  • Local governments have generally ranged from avoidance to indifference in their response to approaches from communities and civil society. Reform of the LG sector is critical for development in the region
  • Civil society groups need to be more proactive in creating well-grounded relationships with officials responsible for core service delivery at both state and local government levels
  • Political representatives will often go through superficial engagement in order to generate short-term goodwill without an underlying commitment to improved governance or service delivery

Lesson 2

Government approaches to “development” present significant barriers to community-led advocacy and initiatives
  • There is a contract driven approach to ‘development’ where the product rather than the service is the key deliverable. In too many cases the contract and profits that can be extracted are the only goal and the product will never be delivered
  • There is a fundamental disconnect between “representatives” and communities. Elected representatives see no value in building a relationship because there is no reliance on the communities they represent to remain in office

Lesson 3

Lack of transparency at State and Local Government levels remains a major problem – with information unavailable or only selectively available
  • Local government budgets in particular are not available to the local population and those that are available are not transparent
  • Immense time and persistent effort is required to obtain even limited information
  • State Governments too often delay or simply fail to provide copies of their budget and more crucially actual expenditure on services is only rarely released
  • The focus on budgets often distracts from the fundamental need for government bodies to publicly and comprehensively report on services they should deliver
  • Concerted pressure needs to be applied on all government bodies to release both budgets and annual accounts of their activities

Lesson 4

Community confidence and cohesion remains a critical issue for developing any constituency for reform
  • Communities are often divided, untrusting and lack the space or capacity to collectivise their power to address their core needs
  • Adequate time building community cohesion is critical for any subsequent advocacy success
  • Community members are willing to donate their time to processes that they believe will deliver their collective developmental needs
  • NGOs play an important role in both building community unity and ‘opening doors’ for community led advocacy by facilitating sustained engagement

Lesson 5

Community led advocacy can leverage basic service delivery despite the dominance of the patronage based political system
  • Even with systems dominated by political patronage and bureaucracy there is some space for communities to secure better services if they continue to work effectively with community leadership and partner organisations
  • Persistence is a major issue. Communities and their partners must be ready to knock on many doors repeatedly if they are to achieve success
  • Advocacy does not end at the granting of a project. It is crucial that communities and partners maintain engagement and monitor development contracts as they are implemented

Lesson 6

Democratisation will be crucial to further progress in transparency and accountability
  • Many of the shortcomings with present responses from government are traceable to the fact that very few politicians over the past decade in the Niger Delta contested elections that were judged anything approaching free and fair
  • If the credibility of upcoming elections improves then communities will have significantly better leverage over representatives
  • The 2011 Federal, State elections are vital to the progress of transparency and accountability, as are the next round of local government elections