Implementing Citizens Charter in government organizations: A meta-synthesis Approach

A Citizens Charter is a written document that is applied as a tool to increase the empowerment of citizens, strengthen the accountability of agents, and increase trust between service users and suppliers and increases organizational effectiveness and performance by creating a public commitment to adherence to measure service delivery standards. Now more than three decades after drafting the concept of the Citizens Charter, there is still a scientific and practical gap in this regard. Considering this issue, the main purpose of this article is to identify the steps to establishing the Citizens Charter in government organizations. The article is practical in terms of purpose and qualitative in terms of data type. Utilization of the Meta-synthesis method and the seven- stage process technique of Sandelowski and Barroso (2007) and the Critical Assessment Skills Program (CASP), ultimately 20 articles have been employed in the present article.A review of the literature revealed that the theoretical framework and foundations of the Citizens Charter are based on civil rights, public governance, modern public administration, and the management of public values. Moreover, after reviewing the obtained article, the model of establishing a Citizens Charter, including four stages of preparation, design, deployment, forecasting, and evaluation was presented using text analysis in the MAXQDA software. In the end, it concluded that implementing the Citizens Charter in government organizations promotes the standardization of services, information, accessibility, participation, non-discrimination, accountability, transparency, reliability, and dissatisfaction redressal mechanism.