How can social accountability projects enhance citizen engagement to deliver pro-poor policy and practice changes in Africa? This report draws on five years’ of lessons and case studies from implementing the Mwananchi Governance and Transparency Programme in six African countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Uganda and Zambia. It argues that there are three major problems with the way social accountability initiatives are designed and implemented: failure to engage with the incentives at the heart of collective-action problems; theories of change that fail to take advantage of learning by doing; generic support to ‘cookie-cutter’ agents of change, rather than first identifying the right process to create change. It recommends more focus on understanding and analysing conflicting incentives, on engaging with contextual dynamics, and on processes of ‘interlocution’ which work to find solutions to collective action problems.
The report notes that each situation will require a context-specific change process in which selected actors, or interlocutors, can orchestrate changes in citizen-state relations at various levels. These processes can go beyond resolving the problem itself: they can address the incentives and rules from the wider environment (such as government policies or the allocation of aid). This should be the focus of social-accountability interventions.
Experience from the Mwananchi programme suggests that effective citizen engagement that transforms citizen-state relationships in favour of the poor requires understanding of and support for ‘interlocution processes’, then ‘interlocutors’, which work to find solutions to collective action problems. It is important to focus, not on actors and categories of actors, but on the relationships that can enable actors to facilitate, or even enforce, change. Accountability grows out of these relationships; it is cultivated through both the informal and the procedural rules of the game, and their enforcement. This in turn helps to deliver sustainability, in time leading to the ‘answerabililty’ of public-office holders: the legal or political obligation of the state to justify decisions to the public. The report recommends:
- Treating social-accountability projects as policy experiments: showing what a good policy would look like and how it could be implemented effectively; also investing in this process
- Viewing social accountability as learning to build trust-based relationships: allowing local realities and relationships, rather than imported social-accountability tools, to be the primary drivers of change
- A level playing-field for marginalised citizens: promoting rules that provide political leverage either directly to the poor or to elite interests in such a way that there is benefit for both them and the poor
- Gradual movement from ‘accountability as responsiveness’ to ‘accountability as answerability’: using sanctions developed by actors in a relationship of trust during the process of solving the collective-action problem, with appropriate measures for mitigating risks. In most of the Mwananchi projects, so-called ‘accountability’ often just involved a public-office holder providing what communities were asking for as if to silence their voices, rather than being answerable for agreed performance to particular standards.
