Transparency and accountability initiatives (TAIs) have emerged as a key strategy for improving public services, but the links between transparency and accountability and their impact on service delivery are often largely assumed. This article reviews several TAIs to assess their impact. It finds evidence suggesting that a range of accountability initiatives have been effective in their immediate goals and have had a strong impact on public services in a few cases, but that overall evidence of impact on the quality and accessibility of services is more mixed.
This article adds to a relatively small body of work which attempts to systematically examine the evidence on the impact of such TAIs in the field of public service delivery. The main argument of the article is that, despite the popularity of such initiatives, there is little evidence to make emphatic claims about the conditions under which TAIs will lead to effectiveness and impact. The reasons for this are several: vagueness about what an initiative means, the fragmented nature of the evidence, a lack of systematic attention to impact, and few comparative studies that focus on the identification of key enabling factors.
The article’s key findings are the following:
- The links between transparency and accountability and their impact and effectiveness in the service-delivery arena are often largely assumed in the literature rather than explicitly articulated. Many initiatives are focused on increasing transparency and amplifying voice, without examining their link with accountability and ultimately responsiveness.
- There is a lack of clarity about what the expected impacts actually are. Some studies look at the strengthening of the media as an expected impact, while others consider active and independent media to be a factor in other impacts such as improved responsiveness. This confusion arises partly because studies of impact rarely examine the impact of accountability and transparency alone, looking instead at the impact of a range of governance interventions, such as changing incentives for public officials or improved management processes. Moreover, different studies identify a wide range of expected impacts: from improving the quality of governance to increased empowerment of citizens.
- The main finding of this review is that the wide range and diversity of initiatives in the service-delivery sector make it very difficult to establish firm conclusions about key factors that matter in achieving impact, even within similar initiatives. The initiatives themselves vary widely even within the same broad subtype, for example within community monitoring of services. The evidence suggests that TAIs score higher on effectiveness – in that they are often well implemented and reach first-order goals such as the use of complaint mechanisms or the exposure of corruption – than on impact, such as improving responsiveness of providers or of services themselves.
- The overarching lesson is that the context, particularly the political context, matters. Political-economy factors, the nature and strength of civil-society movements, the relative political strength of service providers (for example, teacher unions), the ability of cross-cutting coalitions to push reforms, the legal context, and active media all appear to have contributed in varying degrees to the successful cases.
- In terms of what works, several studies highlight that citizen-led initiatives have impact when there is willingness from the public sector to support attempts to improve accountability. Most available evidence of impact is based on collective rather than individual action, and accountability or transparency mechanisms that have the potential to trigger strong sanctions are more likely to be used and to be effective in improving responsiveness by providers. Information and transparency are a necessary but not sufficient condition for desired outcomes to be realised. Finally, and most importantly, accountability and transparency initiatives without corresponding support for increasing the capacity to respond can lead to inaction and frustration on the part of providers. Often, successful initiatives have constructive engagement and dialogue between providers and users about potential reforms as part of the process of demanding accountability.