This preliminary literature review finds that, so far, evidence on what works in interventions relating to accountability and empowerment is fragmentary. Studies using the same method (such as RCTs) often yield different outcomes in different contexts, suggesting that success or failure is very dependent on context. Indeed, a number of cases across a range of sectors suggest the key influence of political dynamics on the success or failure of interventions. While there is some evidence of what works in specific areas, impact on long-term political dynamics is difficult to determine.
There is no consensus on the definitions of empowerment or accountability or on the relationships between them. This makes it difficult to look for evidence to support hypothetical overarching relationships of causality in the wide array of interventions that come under the umbrella of empowerment and accountability. Some areas, such as beneficiary participation in water systems projects, citizen report cards, interventions to strengthen education and employment status and electoral interventions, reveal examples of evidence of positive effects, as well as suggesting their enabling conditions. Other areas, such as the impact on long term political dynamics, have been less well researched.
An overarching finding is the importance of contextual factors. Further, impacts in one sphere do not necessarily result in impacts in another sphere. For example, although interventions may improve women’s role in the market place, this may not given them more power in the home or better representation in relation to the state. In addition:
- Some studies show that participation in water systems projects fosters individual and community empowerment.
- Access to education has a major influence on women’s social status within the community and is a strong predictor of maternal mortality independent of socio-economic status.
- Long term impacts are difficult to track and to attribute to any given intervention. (However, it seems that quotas for female politicians in India may have had a beneficial effect on long-term changes in attitudes to women leaders.)
- There is a tension between the long-term processes of transforming state-society relations and donors’ needs or desires to focus on short and medium-term results.
- The conceptual literature emphasises that empowerment cannot be bestowed by donor or government interventions. Studies on the outcomes of citizen engagement reinforce this, showing that citizens often engaged outside officially prescribed channels.
A number of cases show the key influence of political dynamics on the success or failure of interventions across a range of sectors:
- Broad coalitions of support for interventions that include powerful groups contribute to success in some cases.
- Less favourable political dynamics and social norms, for example in relation to the social standing of women and other marginalised groups, sometimes cause interventions to have limited or disempowering outcomes.
- Power relations and informal institutional processes may limit the impact of interventions intended to transform formal institutions.
In order to gather more evidence on what works in empowerment and accountability interventions and what types of wider interventions and conditions support empowerment and accountability, it is important to:
- Undertake more impact evaluations.
- Develop review questions to look at broader literatures such as those on microfinance, cash transfers and natural resource management.
- Embed learning into future empowerment and accountability work, with some standardisation of meso- and lower-level evaluative research questions, in order to increase understanding of impact at scale.
