Responsiveness of local government officials: insights and lessons from participatory planning and budgeting

Ensuring effective service delivery to the citizens has become a common agenda for all the governments of the welfare states. Keeping this importance in mind, the government of Bangladesh enacted the Local Government (Union Parishad) act, 2009 (hereinafter the UP act, 2009) for ensuring people’s access to its local level planning and budgeting process. In this connection, the UP functionaries are responsible to perform double roles: ensuring the participation of people in the participatory planning and budgeting process, and providing services as per their demands. This paper is based on data collected from the UP functionaries of a total of six UPs. A questionnaire was developed having nine statements relating to the roles of the UP functionaries about UP planning…