The Moderating Effect of Collective Action in the Relationship between Civic Engagement and Water Service Delivery in Kondoa District, Tanzania

Abstract

Civic engagement has been an area of research after adoption as an important approach to strengthen citizens’ voice, accountability and communication in public service delivery. However, there is mixed result on its relationship with public service delivery, particularly water services. Civic engagement studies consider collective action as critical success factor in public service delivery. Therefore, this study focused on testing the moderating effect of collective action on the relationship between civic engagement and water service delivery in Kondoa District Council of Tanzania using a cross-sectional design with a sample of 376 households. Cronbach’s alpha value was above 0.7, which was considered good and acceptable. The moderated binary logistic regression was used for data analysis. The analysis confirms the significant moderation effects of collective action on the relationship between citizens’ voice and all three-outcome variables, physical accessibility, quality, and quantity of water supplied. Similarly, collective action had a significant moderation effect on the relationship between accountability and domestic water service delivery variables except for the quantity of water supplied. Moreover, the effect of collective action in the relationship between communication and all the variables of water service delivery is not significant. The study concluded that the influence of civic engagement in water service delivery is effective when citizens are organised into collective action. The study recommends that civic engagement should be strengthened through tailor-made training and mentorship to implant collective action attributes to citizens on issues of public concern, i.e. water service delivery and management.