Can Social Audits Improve Health and Nutrition Service Provision? Experimental Evidence from Rural Odisha, India
通过随机对照试验，研究社会审计对印度奥里萨邦农村边缘人群健康与营养服务获取的影响，发现审计能快速提升服务意识、公民规范和质量，但对服务使用无显著影响。
This paper experimentally assesses whether social audits can rapidly improve access to health and nutrition services among marginalised rural populations in Odisha, India. We combine a before-after and cluster randomised controlled trial to assess the dynamic effects of social audits over a 4-month period. The experimental comparison is based on the randomisation of the timing of social audits among 156 Gram Panchayats (GPs). Social audits were carried out 3 months before the endline in ‘Early’ GPs and 1 month before the endline in ‘Late’ GPs. We observe marked improvements in levels of awareness of services and entitlements, civic norms, citizen action, and quality of services (but not use of services) one month after the audits. The experimental component of the evaluation reveals that social audits do exert a transformative impact as awareness, civic norms and citizen action increased significantly more where social audits took place first. Confidence in grievance redressal mechanisms drastically drops following the audit, but this proves a transient effect. Our results strongly support the idea that social audits can exert rapid and transformative impacts on access to services among marginalised communities.