How can international development actors help citizens to hold their governments to account? This chapter highlights lessons from a multi-author volume on accountability through public opinion. It argues that to achieve accountability, the following are needed: support for transparency and access to information; a free and plural media; and institutional strengthening for civil society. Public opinion is the real force for direct accountability, and it is important to understand its power and potential. Accountability, as a goal, cannot be separated from public opinion as a defining input.
Accountability exists when institutional conditions compel public servants to justify their actions and sanctions them for wrongdoing. Strengthening institutions is difficult, long-term work.
Good governance is not a matter of finding technocratic solutions, and requires more than legitimate constitutional frameworks. Accountable governance requires the activation and mobilisation of public demands – a constant monitoring and sanctioning function from the bottom up. There are three key ingredients for accountability through activated public opinion:
- At the individual level, a short-term battle needs to be won for public attention, and then a long-term victory is needed through a sustained and sustainable sense of ownership.
- At the institutional level, there needs to be a tethering of intra- and inter-institutional ties between civil society and government service-providing agencies.
- At the mediating level, there is a need for communication networks that allow information to be relayed both from the bottom up and from the top down. These need to guard against co-optation and the manufacturing of consent. They require mobilising narratives, civic education and the cultivation of watchfulness in various sectors.
These three principal ingredients form a ‘stairway to mobilisation’, which represents the mobilisation process from the perspective of civil society. This has the following components:
- The stairway begins with the ‘general public’. Many people may be sympathetic to a particular cause, but civil society organisations need to design information campaigns to move sympathetic members of the general public one step on to the ‘voting public’.
- The next step required is a campaign aimed at attitude change: members of the voting public may not agree with a message, and so need to be convinced. This step will move people from the voting public, to being an ‘attentive public’ who are sympathetic to a message and are therefore more motivated to participate.
- An information campaign aimed at behaviour change will, where successful, convert the attentive public to the ‘active public’. This can be achieved by explaining both the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of translating values into action, and embedding this in a convincing narrative.
- The ideal public is the ‘mobilised public’, who are organised and who regularly participate in political action. Membership of organisations can be strengthened through incentives, rituals, social relations and leadership experience.
