HIGHLIGHTS

• Many resident requests in a Southern Indian municipality took longer than 15 days to resolve, eroding trust in government institutions.
• We designed and tested behavioral interventions aimed at improving responsiveness to constituents’ requests and in particular, expediting the completion of tasks by lower-level revenue officials. 
• Our findings suggest that nudges, tailored to the particular context in which officials operate, can have a substantial impact on the quality of service constituents receive.

The Challenge

Almost one-third of the resident requests in a local government of a South Indian state took longer to resolve than the 15-day limit mandated by the Service Level Agreement (SLA), with most delays occurring during the first three approval levels. Breaking the SLA not only delays request resolution for residents but erodes trust in government institutions and the social contract.

Our Approach

We partnered with the local government of a South Indian state and the eGovernments Foundation (e-Gov), a civic technology organization, to design and test behavioral interventions aimed at improving responsiveness to constituents’ requests and in particular, expediting the completion of tasks by lower-level revenue officials. 

We conducted a behavioral audit and interviews with officials and identified behavioral barriers to timely request resolution:

• Failing to notice new requests
• Prioritizing overall resolution time to the detriment of intermediate steps
• Not perceiving a need to improve their performance

We used two channels to clarify expectations about timeliness, increase the salience of pending requests, and help officials prioritize requests. 

We used text messages to provide officials with personalized statistics about their inboxes, including the number of requests, the number of days a request had been in their queue, the number of requests exceeding the SLA, and an action prompt. We also designed changes to the platform, including adding new fields and tabs, changing the color of requests that exceed intermediary SLAs to red, and providing additional filters to make it easier to identify delayed requests.

Results

A stepped wedge randomized controlled trial showed that overall resolution time decreased by 3.9 days, and level-wise resolution time decreased by 0.5 to 1 day per level. The SMS-based intervention was expanded to 16 additional Urban Local Bodies, which also showed improvements in overall and level-wise resolution times.

Takeaway

Our findings have significant implications for designing systems to support government officials in tracking and responding to requests and complaints. They suggest that nudges, tailored to the particular context in which officials operate, and aimed at mitigating some of the challenges they face, can have a substantial impact on the quality-of-service constituents receive.

Interested in learning more about this work applying behavioral science to a crucial social problem? Reach out to us at info@ideas42.org or tweet at @ideas42 to join the conversation.