Abstract
In many resource-rich developing countries, policymakers, academics, and practitioners alike seek to promote citizen engagement and monitoring in the management of natural resource revenues. However, many of the approaches to improve citizen engagement have not been effective as citizens often lack access to relevant information and opportunities to voice their concerns, and governments have faced financial challenges in engaging citizens. In this article, the authors propose spatial crowdsourcing as an alternative to the traditional ways of encouraging citizen engagement. The proposed approach is illustrated using a simple, intuitive multimedia-based spatial crowdsourcing platform that was tested among farmers who were benefiting from a petroleum-funded project in Ghana. The farmers accessed the platform via their mobile phones and completed a survey relating to the project and petroleum revenue management in Ghana. The findings suggest that spatial crowdsourcing is a promising approach to promote informed citizen engagement in the context of natural resource revenue management. In particular, the farmers indicated that an opportunity to give feedback on the project through a user-friendly platform was very important for them. Furthermore, the representatives of both the government and an oversight body for petroleum revenue management regarded spatial crowdsourcing as a useful tool for collecting feedback on petroleum-funded projects and to increase citizen engagement in natural resource management in general. The authors conclude that although spatial crowdsourcing can help in citizen engagement, its effectiveness in the management of natural resource revenues depends on behavioural changes in governments and citizens.
Highlights
In many resource-rich developing countries, policymakers, aca demics, and practitioners encourage governments to engage their citi zens in matters relating to natural resource revenue management in order to curtail opportunities for corruption and mismanagement, as well as to ensure economic growth and societal development (Ofori and Lujala, 2015; Epremian et al, 2016; Ghose et al, 2017; Cameron and Stanley, 2017)
The farmers accessed the platform via their mobile phones and completed a questionnaire survey that probed their knowledge of petroleum revenue spending in Ghana, sources of information on the Annual Budget Funding Amount (ABFA), and satisfaction with the irrigation project
We sought to understand the importance of spatial crowdsourcing to the ABFA project beneficiaries, the Ministry of Finance, and the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC)
Summary
In many resource-rich developing countries, policymakers, aca demics, and practitioners encourage governments to engage their citi zens in matters relating to natural resource revenue management in order to curtail opportunities for corruption and mismanagement, as well as to ensure economic growth and societal development (Ofori and Lujala, 2015; Epremian et al, 2016; Ghose et al, 2017; Cameron and Stanley, 2017). Citizens’ access to information and their opportunities to provide feedback and demand change has been promoted as a key condition for improved natural resource revenue management (Kolstad and Wiig, 2009; Haufler, 2010). Many of the approaches used to promote citizen engagement in natural resource revenue manage ment have not worked effectively, as people have often lacked access to relevant information and/or opportunities to voice their concerns, and governments have faced financial challenges in providing for citizens engagement (Ofori and Lujala, 2015; Gyampo, 2016; Kasimba and Lujala, 2019; Lujala et al, 2020). We propose spatial crowdsourcing as a feasible and costeffective method for governments and other organisations to dissemi nate information to people and to obtain citizens’ opinions on natural resource revenue governance. As far as we know, spatial crowdsourcing has not been applied to natural resource revenue management
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