26 primarily described by their organizations as such, but rather more about community mobilization and engagement to take direct action to improve public services.

**_Citizen Report Cards_** : The experience of a CSO based in Bangalore, India, the Public Affairs Centre, in pioneering the use of “citizen report cards” as a tool for client power has been celebrated in much of the development policy literature. In the anecdotal evidence provided by Paul (2002), this initiative aggregated citizen perceptions of the quality of urban services provided by various agencies in the city of Bangalore, then publicized these through local media, serving as a massive, collective complaint mechanism. This either “shamed” the agencies into improving services, or sent a strong signal to local municipal politicians that citizens care about service delivery and the politicians in turn put pressure on the providers to improve performance.  Subsequent surveys by the same CSO report substantial improvements in perceptions of service over time.

However, there are diverging results from more rigorous evaluation of such initiatives in rural areas of India and Africa (Uganda). In Uganda, Bjorkman and Svensson (2006) report on interventions in 25 communities where local CSOs organized meetings between community members and health service providers of public clinics around citizen report cards on the quality of care provided at these clinics. Compared to “control” communities where no such discussion took place, in intervention communities both provider attendance and quality of service measures (including wait time and quality of care) improved. The final result was an increase in the immunization rate and a substantial drop in child mortality in the communities where the mobilization interventions occurred. The evidence suggests that these improvements in health services resulted from greater activism by the community in monitoring health clinics and demanding improvements, most likely through existing beneficiary-control institutions called Health Users Management Committees (HUMCs). This is a case in which information, and possibly complementary mobilization, activated a client power mechanism that the state has already set up.

However, similar meetings that were organized by a CSO (Pratham, mentioned earlier) in India around citizen report cards on the quality of education services in 195 intervention villages had no impact on teacher effort, or on learning outcomes in public schools (Banerjee et al, 2010). The intervention also had no impact on a beneficiary-control institution existing in the state (Uttar Pradesh) where the study was conducted—the Village Education Committee (VEC), which is authorized by the state and in principle operates much like the HUMCs for health services in Uganda. In both UP and Uganda these existing institutions were found to be inactive at the baseline.

Yet, perhaps the most striking finding of the India study is that in one set of intervention villages, where the citizen report card was combined with an offer by Pratham to train village volunteers to hold remedial classes outside school, a large number of local youths volunteered to hold such classes, completely bypassing the public school system. In these villages, the children who attended the volunteer-led