Citizen Task-Force
The Citizen Task Force is a coordinated effort organized at a central level by the Social Observatory of Brazil, and carried out locally by the Control Networks of Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, as well as Unicesumar, ERGS, UFN, Fundacao Ulbra, and La Salle Canoas. Individual citizens also participate as volunteers in this monitoring effort. The main goal of this task force is to strenghten accountability and transparency by voluntarily monitoring public expenditure at the local level during the Covid-19 pandemic, to ensure that all public resources that were targeted to combat the pandemic are actually fulfilling their aims. This was especially relevant as Law Nr 13.979/2020 introduced flexibility in funds allocation to respond to the public health emergency. The Task Force is composed by volunteers and technicians who regularly monitor the open data portals of municipal governments to detect deviations in expenditure and eventually report them.
Institutional design
Formalization: is the innovation embedded in the constitution or legislation, in an administrative act, or not formalized at all?
Frequency: how often does the innovation take place: only once, sporadically, or is it permanent or regular?
Mode of Selection of Participants: is the innovation open to all participants, access is restricted to some kind of condition, or both methods apply?
Type of participants: those who participate are individual citizens, civil society organizations, private stakeholders or a combination of those?
Decisiveness: does the innovation takes binding, non-binding or no decision at all?
Co-governance: is there involvement of the government in the process or not?
- Formalization
- not backed by constitution nor legislation, nor by any governmental policy or program
- Frequency
- sporadic
- Mode of selection of participants
- open
- Type of participants
- citizens civil society
- Decisiveness
- democratic innovation yields no decision
- Co-Governance
- no
Means
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Ends
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