Citizen's Charter Research Articles

Da Constituição de Cádis à Constituição Federal de 1988: A Conquista da Cidadania Índigena no Brasil

O artigo tem como objetivo apontar um mecanismo para solução dos conflitos entre direitos fundamentais ou princípios constitucionais, mais especificamente do conflito entre a proteção das manifestações culturais imateriais de religiões de matriz africana, que utilizam animais de forma sacrificial, e a proteção do meio ambiente ecologicamente equilibrado, com ênfase na proteção da fauna. Os direitos fundamentais são estudados em sua gênese teórica e evolução legislativa, até a perspectiva atual do tratamento constitucional do tema. Ao final é oferecida uma técnica, que tenciona restringir os princípios de forma a possibilitar a permanência e realização de ambos, garantindo a efetividade constitucional.

Critical Challenges in Implementing the Citizen's Charter Initiative: Insights from Selected Local Government Units

Globally recognized as a best practice, the Citizen’s Charters were developed under the paradigm of New Public Management (NPM), which uses business-like perspective and tools by bringing the public as a customer in the center of public service delivery. Building on these successes, the Philippine government launched an Anti-Red Tape program based largely on RA 9485 that mandates the creation of Citizen’s Charters for all frontline services of the government including local governments. This paper evaluates the compliance of selected charters to the provision of the law and reveals that the Citizen’s Charters developed show absence of stakeholder involvement in the its formulation, varying levels of compliance on the required information in the charter, inconsistencies in the information provided, and lack of customization and innovation on the part of the LGUs with respect to content and form of the charter. These findings indicate that the Citizen’s Charter as implemented does not consistently hold the basic principles of NPM and ‘charterism’.

Awareness, implementation process and impact of a citizen's charter: A case study from a primary health care setting of Nepal

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Fostering good governance at peripheral public health facilities: an experience from Nepal

The Nepalese primary healthcare system at sub-district level consists of three different levels of health facility to serve the mostly rural population. The Ministry of Health and Population decentralised health services by handing over 1433 health facilities in 28 districts to Health Facility Operation and Management Committees (HFOMCs), which were formed following a public meeting, and consist of 9 to 13 members, representing the health facility in-charge, elected members of the village development committee, dalit (disadvantaged caste) and women members. The purpose was to make this local committee responsible for managing all affairs of the health facility. However, the handing over of the health facilities to HFOMCs was not matched by an equivalent increase in the managerial capacity of the members, which potentially makes this initiative ineffective. The Health Facility Management Strengthening Program was implemented in 13 districts to foster good governance in the health facilities by increasing the capacity of HFOMCs. This effort focuses on capacity building of HFOMCs as a continuous process rather than a one-off event. Training, follow-up and promotional activities were conducted. This article focuses on how good governance at the peripheral public health facilities in Nepal can be fostered through the active engagement and capacity building of HFOMCs. This article used baseline and monitoring data collected during technical support visits to HFOMCs and their members between July 2008 and October 2011. The results show that the Health Facility Management Strengthening Program was quite successful in strengthening local health governance in the health facilities. The level of community engagement in governance improved, that is, the number of effective HFOMC meetings increased, the inclusion of dalit/women members in the decision-making process expanded, resource mobilization was facilitated, and community accountability, as measured by health facility opening days, increased. Furthermore, availability of technical staff, supervision and monitoring, and display of the citizen charter increased, and health services became more inclusive. Several lessons emerged. Functioning of HFOMCs is largely dependent on the process of selecting members, the staff and community's support of the HFOMC, and a sense of volunteerism and team spirit among the members. Similarly, to ensure the effective participation of dalit/woman members, the educational and livelihood empowerment of the members is deemed necessary. Furthermore, capacity building of and giving authority to HFOMCs should go hand-in-hand. Local governance of health facilities was fostered through the local people's active engagement in HFOMCs and capacity building of the HFOMC members.

Good Governance at the Grass-roots

Considering the importance of good governance, the article explores the governance situation of the lowest local government tier (Union Parishad) in Bangladesh. Through the application of four good governance indicators—leadership, people’s participation, transparency and accountability and equity—the expectation is that the findings would add a new dimension to the existing knowledge of local governance. Based on empirical data collected from the field, the study findings suggest that the governance situation at the local level is not conducive for the establishment of good governance and strong local democracy in the country. Despite incorporation of different provisions ( ward shava, open budget, citizen charter and right to information) in the Local Government (Union Parishad) Act of 2009, the government has failed to ensure participation, accountability, good governance and transparency. Against this backdrop, the governance of local government bodies has been characterised by reluctance of local government leaders in ensuring development, lack of people’s participation, transparency and accountability and unequal distribution of services.

A model Citizen's Charter for disaster management in Uttaranchal (India)

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to persuade all partners in disaster management to take action and create a pair of synergistic and invincible forces – government and people – that interact to bring about a reduction in the impact of natural hazards in Uttaranchal, India.Design/methodology/approach – There is an urgent need for a comprehensive tool to make the community aware of its right to safety. Today, policies and planning for disaster management are a State subject, in which the participation of the community is negligible. Therefore, disaster management has become supply‐driven instead of demand‐driven.Findings – A Citizen's Charter of Disaster Management is considered to be another appropriate tool to bring in citizen‐centric governance. The Charter aspires to meet the present and anticipated needs of citizens in an efficient manner by eradicating errors and wastage through a scientific approach with participation between government and citizens.Research limitations/implications – The analys...

Policy Transfer and Citizen Charter: The Indian Experience

Policy Transfer and Citizen Charter: The Indian Experience

Rite of passage

Patients have rights but do they also have responsibilities? John Major's 1991 Citizen's Charter set out for the first time in the UK the right of “consumers” of health care to a certain level of service. It was an important initiative but it got the balance wrong. It made no mention of patients' responsibilities. Why are responsibilities important? Because the patient is central to health care. Luisa Dillner, who set up the BMJ 's Best Treatments website for patients, has always (I think rightly) disputed Liam Donaldson's airline analogy for patient safety. Patients should not be seen simply as passengers, entirely dependent …

Limits of the Citizen's Charter in India

In line with the current neoliberal public sector reforms, there has recently emerged the so-called Citizen's Charter in many developed and developing nations. In most cases, this Citizen's Charter aims to ensure the delivery of services based on quality, promptness, transparency and customer choice realized through the display of information related to services expected, their quality standards, feedback options and complaint and redress mechanisms. In the case of India, although this Citizen's Charter may benefit affluent customers, it is less likely to ensure access to services for the majority who suffer from various forms of social exclusion based on class, caste and gender. This article explores how such social exclusion may render the Charter ineffective for the less privileged citizens. It concludes by stressing the need for appropriate initiatives to overcome such social exclusion as a precondition for the success of the Citizen's Charter in India.

CITIZEN'S CHARTERS

Citizen's charter initiatives (variously named) have been launched in many countries around the world. However, they take a wide variety of different forms, the development of charters, though widespread, falls a long way short of being a ‘new global paradigm’. Focusing on the experience of the Citizen's Charter in the United Kingdom, the essay shows how charters can comfortably be embraced both by New Right free market individualists and by New Left collectivists with communitarian leanings. In the UK, the Citizen's Charter has blended, ‘chameleon-like’, into the landscape of the public services, to a point where it is now far less visible than it once was. However, the essay also highlights some of the potential shortcomings of charters: the risk of emphasizing individual entitlements without at the same time encouraging collective civic obligations; the absence of legal underpinning; the exposure of under-trained front-line staff to the wrath of empowered consumers.

市民参加のまちづくりにおける市民憲章の可能性に関する考察

Since the law of city planning was revised in 1992, citizen participation in town planning has become active all over Japan. However citizen charter, which ought to be called the constitution of town planning, has never been studied enough in spite of including much possibility about the style of participation. The purpose of this study is to clarify the present condition of citizen charters in Japan and to consider its meaning in town planning through the view point of citizen participation.

SERVICE CHARTERS - GLOBAL CONVERGENCE OR NATIONAL DIVERGENCE? A comparison of initiatives in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States

This article examines the transfer of NPM strategies by comparing Service Charter initiatives in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia. These three countries, together with Canada and New Zealand,are partofwhathas beendescribedas the ‘core’ new public management (NPM) policy community (Common 1998). Service Charters are an NPM strategy intended to change the culture of public service delivery to focus on the needs of the users, identified as ‘clients’ or ‘customers’. The objectives are to make service providers more responsive to users by guaranteeing specific standards for service delivery, providing a substitute for competition and a benchmark for measuring service quality. The first section examines the historical and political context of the development of the Citizen's Charter and Service First programmes in the UK, customer service plans in the USA and Government Service Charters in Australia. The second section explores the similarities and differences between these charter initiatives based on analysis of public documents. There is evidence of convergence at the ideological level as managerial values underpin the service charter frameworks in all three jurisdictions (Walsh 1994; Pollitt 1995; Kettl 1997). Despite drawing from a similar toolkit influenced by private sector techniques, significant differences between the country contextshaveresultedindivergent strategies. Timing in the three countries examined suggests that national politics rather than global policy convergence is more significant in explaining the development of service charters. This case study provides evidence of policy transfer rather than policy convergence (Common 1998). The final section considers the limitations of the customer service model. Monitoring quality iscentral to theprogrammes in all three countries. Performance monitoring is essentially a quantitative methodology that requires criteria and indicators for measuring the quality of service delivery and programme outcomes. Two problems are considered. The first is the difficulty of specifying and measuring service quality. The second is that quality indicators derived from services marketing and management research do not take into account the characteristics of public services.

Chris Willett (Ed.): Public Sector Reform and the Citizen's Charter. London: Blackstone Press, 1996.

Chris Willett (Ed.): Public Sector Reform and the Citizen's Charter. London: Blackstone Press, 1996.

Citizens, Charters and Public Service Reform in France and Britain

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES THE PATTERN OF SIMILARITIES AND differences in Britain and France with regard to public service charterism: that strand of recent public service reform designed to reconstruct relations between the state and the citizen on the basis of new or revitalized principles of public service, epitomized by the Citizen's Charter (1991) in Britain and the Charte des Services Publics (1992) in France. Despite the appearance of increasing convergence in the rhetoric of public management reform in the two countries during the 1990s, especially during the incumbency of centre-left governments in the latter part of the decade, there is evidence of continuing divergence in the philosophy and practice of public service charterism. This article argues that variation is a function of the existence of country-specific public service regimes, embodying different ideals of citizenship, which have shaped the emergence and implementation of charter policy in Britain and France.

Minerva: April 2000

The United Kingdom's dead citizens charter was established last year to improve end of life experiences and promote better funeral practices. It identifies 30 areas that need an overhaul, including the availability of information for relatives organising a funeral. Institutions such as hospitals, hospices, and nursing homes need funeral advisers, say the National Funerals College, to guide relatives rationally through a choice of funeral directors and disposal options. A pilot study is planned. Many general practitioners dream of paperless surgeries, where piles of patient records, BMJ s, and guidelines no longer litter the carpet tiles. For now, however, 96% of practices are stuck with paper, according to a recent British survey ( British Journal of General Practice 2000;50:46.7). Most respondents blamed high costs for slow progress with computerisation. Others were worried about the legal status of purely electronic records. The NHS Executive's plans to convert all practices to electronic records by 2005 are beginning to look overoptimistic. Seasonal mood changes are common in western Europe, and they tend to occur over winter. Chinese medical students, however, go gloomy in the summer ( American Journal of …

まちづくりにおける市民参加の前提としての和語の重要性に関する研究 : 東京都の市民憲章の言語表現を例として

In the case that citizens participate in making plans of their own towns, there are two possibilities. One is participation in town planning conference and work shops which are prepared by local government, and the other is petition to local assembly. Especially song of city, citizen charter and city declaration are the important variation of citizen participation on the latter case. The purpose of this paper is to point out the importance of Wago, the words which have their origins in the ancient Japanese, as a premise of citizen participation about the case of citizen charters of Tokyo.

Raising the Expectation Interest: New Labour and the Citizen's Charter

The Citizen's Charter is essentially a charter for consumers of public services rather than a blueprint for enhancing the constitutional and political rights of the citizen. In the private sector, consumers of goods and services are protected by legislation governing the sales of goods which bestows entitlements upon them, and reinforces their expectation interest. The relationship between purchaser and provider is contractual so that if goods are faulty or the service does not match its description or the expectation of the consumer, there is an entitlement to seek redress in the form of exchange of goods, refund or damages. Whilst most public services cannot be so precise in content and objectives as private goods and services, the Citizen's and service charters nevertheless established an expectation on the part of the consumer that quality, choice, standards and value would be provided and that there would be redress in the form of compensation or, at the very least, an explanation and apology if the service did not meet expectations. Therefore it could be argued that an expectation interest was implicit in the use of a service reflecting the customer's ability to cite the objectives of the relevant charter in a dispute about a service received. This article explores the extent to which there is a legitimate expectation interest for the user of public services and examines how far New Labour's plans for strengthening the Charter enhance that expectation interest by focusing on entitlements of citizenship, as well as consumerism.

Propaganda, Persuasion and Symmetry: Local and Central Government Perspectives on Communicating with the Citizen

The paper gives a brief resumé of the major public relations models and relates these to central and local government communication with the public. It gives central government's perspective on the Citizen's Charter and shows how this translates into a construct of reality based on four perceptions. Next, these four perceptions are subjected to scrutiny from the local government perspective, drawing on the results of a research project undertaken during 1995 on the publication of performance indicators (PIs). The paper concludes by questioning central government's wisdom in trying to prescribe a communications model which does not fit local circumstances.

Citizen's Charter—An Instrument of Public Accountability: Problems and Prospects in India

Citizen's Charter—An Instrument of Public Accountability: Problems and Prospects in India

New developments in public administration: country report Citizen's Charter: people's charter in the UK

New developments in public administration: country report Citizen's Charter: people's charter in the UK