What are the factors—enabling and disabling—that shape the possibility of TAIs achieving their goals in a particular context? This report focuses on social accountability (SA) and solely on the accountability of public officials. It aims to fill three specific knowledge gaps and provides guidance on how to assess contextual drivers of SA effectiveness. Its principal contribution is to provide a framework for thinking about and operationalizing SA.
First, the report analyses the various schools of thought underpinning the concept of SA and their implications for operationalizing the concept. It conceptualizes SA as the interplay of five constitutive elements: citizen action and state action, as well as information, interface, and civic mobilization. Second, it reviews the range of outcomes that can be associated with SA, points to reasons for this mixed body of evidence, and summarizes some key findings and third, it explores the contextual drivers of SA’s five constitutive elements, their relationships, and the enabling or disabling factors that can affect them.
Key findings:
- Although information is clearly instrumental to any SA approach, it should not be the sole area of focus for supporting and measuring SA. The report challenges the common understanding that information leads citizens to demand accountability (citizen action), which in turn leads states to respond to citizen demand (state action). The accessibility of the information, its framing (supporting salience to citizens or the state on the issue, presenting the information in a novel way, or providing consistent messages to trigger action), and the level of trust that citizens or the state have in the information and its medium are essential drivers for citizen and state action. Yet information alone might not be sufficient to trigger state or citizen action in the absence of effective agents or organizations capable of mobilizing both state and citizen actors to engage in SA or a credible, representative, known, and accessible interface.
- The supply-demand dichotomy is unhelpful because it does not reflect reality, since many SA approaches focus on building supportive pro-accountability networks across state and society. Neither civil society nor the state is made up of monolithic homogeneous groups, these categories frequently overlap. These overlaps and interactions offer opportunities for building and supporting coalitions across-the-board supporting stronger accountability. Administrative, political, and social accountability can be distinguished for the sake of analysis, but the links need to be acknowledged and leveraged.
- An instrumental view of SA as supportive of stronger service delivery is reductive of the potential of SA in driving deeper institutional changes. The range of potential outcomes of SA is wide: from benefits in the state (better governance), in state-society relationships (increased legitimacy), or in society (improved provision of public goods) and from instrumental (improved provision of public goods) to institutional (state building). An instrumental view of SA seems especially reductive in the context of fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCSs).
- SA may not be effective in all contexts or for all issues, it entails risks and trade-offs. When and how to support SA processes need to be assessed keeping this in mind, all the more so when the support is externally funded. SA processes do not automatically lead to positive outcomes. Numerous studies show the risks of instrumentalization or perversion of SA processes, leading to elite capture, tokenistic participation, apathy or disappointment, and even disengagement and retribution. The trade-offs are difficult to assess, but they should always entail a cost-benefit analysis of the engagement from the citizens’ perspective. SA appears more likely to be effective where it builds on existing “organic” pressures for change and accountability. Discrete, donor-dependent SA interventions may bring about localized changes, but they may not be sustainable. Evidence finds that embedding SA interventions and principles in institutions, country systems, and all stages of the policy cycle works better.
Recommendations to donors:
Since SA may entail a reconfiguration of social and political powers, SA approaches can sometimes be controversial. In some cases, external partners may not be in a position to engage in or support the whole gamut of SA approaches, and this should be acknowledged up front. SA involves changes in behavioural, social, and political processes, as such, it is imperative to adopt an adaptive learning-by-doing attitude, for instance, by following a “problem-driven iterative adaptation” approach. There are many cases of SA approaches achieving measurable and positive outcomes within a short time frame. Yet expectations of what SA can achieve in a given time period have to be realistic, and a long-term commitment to support sustainable SA approaches is needed.
