Nathaniel Heller is the executive vice president of integrated strategies at Results for Development (R4D), which works with change agents such as government officials, sometime social entrepreneurs and civil society activists to design and execute strategies for strengthening health, education and nutrition system. Prior to joining R4D in 2015, Heller co-founded and led Global Integrity, a non-profit organization that promotes government transparency and accountability worldwide. During his time as executive director of Global Integrity, Heller led the organization since its inception in 2005 through a period of intensive growth that saw Global Integrity established as a global leader on anti-corruption and governance issues. Republica‘s Kosh Raj Koirala caught up with him during his recent trip to Kathmandu in order to learn the efforts of his organization to promote transparency and accountability. Excerpts:

What brings you to Nepal this time?
The visit was organized by the Kathmandu-based US embassy, which, I think, is trying to start conversation around governance, transparency, accountability. There are a couple of other reasons that were useful and interesting to me. One is, I am in the global steering committee of the club of countries in the open government partnership. We really want Nepal to join it. So, it’s been a good trip to meet and try to convince government officials in several places to encourage Nepal to join. Thirdly, I have a personal connection that has been very fun to play out this week. There is a community in Nepal, a physical space called opengov hub, which is a community of organizations and activists working in the field of transparency and accountability issues. And, that was a space and community that I built in Washington five years ago. Some of the groups there also work in Nepal with Nepalese partners.

Can you briefly introduce the concept of open government?
It is a kind of new concept that came into the scene some ten years ago. I think the best definition is that the government should do three things. One is to be very transparent in the way it works. Second is that the government should be participatory and citizens should have active role in the way the government decision gets made and in the way services get delivered. Thirdly, there should be accountability and those making decision in the public sectors need to be accountable. So, this is an elegant concept that has three basic pillars.

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However, many countries struggle to accurately capture rehabilitation expenditures in National Health Accounts (NHA) due to data-related issues. In Nepal, local stakeholders agree that previous NHA reports did not provide adequate information on how investments are spent, what gaps remain in funding, and how resource allocation can be optimized to benefit the population. The Accelerator sought to investigate available rehabilitation expenditure data and practices in Nepal and produce guidance for how to improve rehabilitation expenditure tracking moving forward. This involved defining the boundaries of rehabilitation services to be used within Nepal’s health accounting framework, developing a data collection tool to capture expenditure on these services at the facility level, and testing this tool among health facilities located in Kathmandu. These efforts aimed to support Nepal’s Ministry of Health and Population’s (MOHP) Department of Health Services (DoHS), Epidemiology and Disease Control Division’s (EDCD) Leprosy Control Section Leprosy Control and Disability Management Section (LCDMS) to utilize NHAs as evidence to inform rehabilitation policy decisions in the future. 

The objectives of this brief are to 1) Clarify the policy imperatives for tracking rehabilitation spending in Nepal, 2) Provide an overview of the methods and results of developing and testing a data collection tool at health facilities in Kathmandu, and 3) Offer recommendations for how rehabilitation expenditure data collection methods can be improved moving forward.  

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Nepal has a great potential to take the lead among South Asian countries in terms of decentralisation and public accountability, according to Nathaniel Heller, executive vice president of Integrated Strategies of the Results for Development Institute, USA.

Sharing the findings of Results for Development Institute regarding decentralisation and public accountability of different nations during an US Embassy-organised event here today, Heller said that Nepal can take the lead in both areas by acknowledging and adopting various global evidences in designing the forthcoming constitutional reforms and decentralisation processes.

“As the fiscal transparency movement remains robust globally, Nepal could benefit by learning from regional and global peers in the run-up to potential decentralisation, where fiscal transparency and accountability issues are crucial,” Heller said.

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In mid-September, world leaders will gather in New York City for the UN General Assembly meetings to tackle a range of thorny sustainable development and geopolitical challenges. Among the most important challenges is how to rebuild trust in government.

In dozens and dozens of countries around the world, public opinion polling shows public trust in government and public institutions at an all-time low, regardless of geography or income levels. Nepal is no stranger to this conversation; successive governments have been wracked by corruption and public financial management crises, with many observers lamenting the political class’ habit of “recycling” leadership at the top despite their involvement in previous scandals.

Can Nepal break this cycle and rebuild trust in government? Perhaps. But it will take sustained political leadership and a commitment to embracing the country’s ongoing decentralization efforts, in order to cement principles of transparency, accountability and participation from the grassroots all the way up to Kathmandu. This is Nepal’s open government moment.

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