The Challenges of Using Citizen Reporting to Improve Public Services: A Field Experiment on Solid Waste Services in Uganda

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, forthcoming

90 Pages Posted: 27 Dec 2018 Last revised: 18 May 2020

See all articles by Mark Buntaine

Mark Buntaine

University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)

Patrick Hunnicutt

University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)

Polycarp Komakech

University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)

Date Written: May 16, 2020

Abstract

Governments around the world are investing in technologies that allow citizens to participate in the coproduction of public services by providing monitoring and feedback, but there is little evidence about how these initiatives impact the quality of public services. We implemented a large-scale field experiment that involved organizing 50 citizen reporters in each of 100 neighborhoods across Kampala, Uganda to provide weekly reports to the municipal government about the delivery of solid waste services via an SMS-messaging platform, resulting in 23,856 reports during the nine-month study period. Citizen reporting did not reduce informal waste accumulation as targeted, which would indicate improvements to formal services. Using our observations as participants in the development and deployment of the reporting platform and interviews with staff at the government agency receiving the citizen reports, we show how the public generated inconsistent information that did not fit existing decision-making processes. We generalize lessons from this field experiment by explaining how coproduction involving information sharing through information and communication technologies (ICTs) is likely to impact public services based on the alignment of citizen-produced data with the information problems managers face; the search costs of detecting public services failures; the quality of citizen-produced data; and the operating costs of citizen reporting platforms.

Keywords: Coproduction; citizen reporting; public services; waste management; field experiment;

Suggested Citation

Buntaine, Mark and Hunnicutt, Patrick and Komakech, Polycarp, The Challenges of Using Citizen Reporting to Improve Public Services: A Field Experiment on Solid Waste Services in Uganda (May 16, 2020). Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3299044 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3299044

Mark Buntaine (Contact Author)

University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) ( email )

South Hall 5504
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
United States

Patrick Hunnicutt

University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) ( email )

South Hall 5504
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
United States

Polycarp Komakech

University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) ( email )

South Hall 5504
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
United States

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