This paper takes a fresh look at current efforts to strengthen mutual accountability in international aid relations. It concludes with some practical steps that aid agencies could immediately start to take to encourage mutual responsibility.
The paper asks “What additional possibilities become available when we conceptualise aid as a field of interdependent and dynamic relations that are played out in the absence of pre-established consensus or shared vision concerning desired changes?”
Key findings:
- Mutual accountability requires identifying specific power holders, diffuse or relational power links to ideas of mutual responsibility and the effect we have upon each other and the wider system. Recognising power as central to aid relationships allows for serious critical examination of the organisational cultures and practices that shape expectations of what international aid can and should do. It is equally important to make visible and tackle unhelpful processes that reinforce existing power relations and that may be hindering the effectiveness of mechanisms established to support mutual accountability.
- The tendency is to understand mutual accountability as holding each other to account for performance against pre-established objectives. It reflects a perception of aid as a contract and exemplifies the dominant ‘philosophical plumbing’ of donor organisations, one that views the world as a collection of entities. From this substantialist perspective, mutual accountability is about strengthening mechanisms for regulating behaviour between autonomous parties. But such efforts are constrained by the global political economic structures that sustain the very inequities in aid relations that make mutual accountability so difficult.
- A relational approach, just like a substantialist approach, is not necessarily normative. In other words, it is about explaining how life is, not how it should be. It is not necessarily a theory of change. Relationalism understands entities as mutable, shaped by their position in relation to others. Relational notions, married to ideas of process and complexity illuminate the messy and contradictory quality of aid relations that substantialism finds difficult to cope with. Yet, arguably much of what proves with hindsight to be effective aid may well be an outcome of relational approaches, although such approaches are rarely valued or reported.
- Mutual accountability in aid relations is widely understood in managerial terms as accountability for performance in delivering agreed results. The emphasis on measuring targets, such as increasing the numbers in school, makes invisible the relational processes that can sustain real and durable change. There is a growing literature concerning how to assess wider policy as well as project interventions from a processual/complexity perspective of change being an effect of relational interactions. It requires evaluation methodologies that focus on processes and relations, for example ‘outcome mapping’.
- A process approach would complement the assessment of outcomes by also assessing mutual responsibility for the quality of relations against agreed indicators that could be regularly reviewed and widely commented upon. Because an emphasis on performance measurement can lead to mutual risk-adverse behaviour, compensatory process indicators might include ‘preparedness to take risks’, ‘embracing and learning from failure’ and ‘willingness to change one’s mind.
