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Abstract

Strengthening ‘social accountability’ is emerging as a key strategy for improving public services and attaining the Millennium Development Goals. Yet current conceptualizations of social accountability have tended to focus on it as ‘mechanisms’ or ‘widgets’, a view which tends to depoliticize the very processes through which poor people make claims. We propose an alternative conceptualization which focuses on disaggregating social accountability actions, and viewing them as part of a long-term ongoing political engagement of social actors with the state. Such a conceptualization can advance understandings of when the poor engage in social accountability and the impact it might have.
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Widgets or Watchdogs?
Anuradha Joshi
a
& Peter P. Houtzager
b
a
Institute of Development Studies, University of
Sussex, Brighton, UK E-mail:
b
Institute of Development Studies, University of
Sussex, Brighton, UK E-mail:
To cite this article: Anuradha Joshi & Peter P. Houtzager (2012): Widgets or Watchdogs?,
Public Management Review, 14:2, 145-162
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2012.657837
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WIDGETS OR
WATCHDOGS?
Conceptual explorations in
social accountability
Anuradha Joshi and
Peter P. Houtzager
Anuradha Joshi
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton
UK
E-mail: a.joshi@ids.ac.uk
Peter P. Houtzager
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton
UK
E-mail: p.houtzager@ids.ac.uk
Abstract
Strengthening ‘social accountability’ is emer-
ging as a key strategy for improving public
services and attaining the Millennium Devel-
opment Goals. Yet current conceptualizations
of social accountability have tended to focus
on it as ‘mechanisms’ or ‘widgets’, a view
which tends to depoliticize the very processes
through which poor people make claims. We
propose an alternative conceptualization
which focuses on disaggregating social
accountability actions, and viewing them as
part of a long-term ongoing political engage-
ment of social actors with the state. Such a
conceptualization can advance understand-
ings of when the poor engage in social
accountability and the impact it might have.
Key words
Developing countries, governance, service
delivery, social accountability
Vol. 14 Issue 2 2012 145–162
Public Management Review ISSN 1471-9037 print/ISSN 1471-9045 online
! 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2012.657837
Downloaded by [Peter Houtzager] at 01:04 26 September 2012
INTRODUCTION
Strengthening public accountability is emerging as a key strategy for improving public
services and making progress towards attaining the Millennium Development Goals
(World Bank 2004; Devarajan and Widlund 2006). Increasingly, debates about
mechanisms for strengthening accountability have foc used on what is termed ‘social
accountability’ broadly defined as citizen-led action for demanding accountability
from providers. There is some consensus among observers that social accountability
represents an advance in thinking about ways in which citizens can exercise control over
public authority in contexts where traditional mechanisms of political accountability
have largely failed to deliver.
Consequently, since the early 2000s, the number of publications attempting to
conceptualize, describe and assess social accountability initiatives has steadily increased.
Several papers have focused on conceptualizing social accountability and why it matters
(Malena et al. 2004; Ackerman 2005; Peruzzotti and Smulovitz 2006; Foresti et al.
2007). Other scholars have invested in a number of ‘stocktaking’ exercises of social
accountability initiatives in various regions of the word (Arroyo 2004; McNeil and
Mumvuma 2006; Novikova 2007; Sirker and Cosik 2007; Claasen and Alpin-Lardies
2010). And more recently, although still limited in number, there have been several
attempts to assess the impact of social accountability initiatives on various outcomes
including service delivery, aid transparency, governance and extractive industries,
budgets and freedom of information (O’Neil et al. 2007; Rocha Menocal and Sharma
2008; Gaventa and Barrett 2010; Gaventa and McGee 2010; McGee and Gaventa
2010).
1
In this article, we trace the rise of social accountability as a reaction against the
failure of traditional mechanisms of accountability to deliver public goods and
examine attempts to assess its impact. The key arguments are two-fold. First,
current formulations of social accountability have tended to focus on labelled
‘mechanisms’ or ‘widgets’ (e.g. social audits, community score cards, etc.) that
have either evolved organically in a few cou ntries of ‘origin’, or have been
introduced by external actors such as civil society organizations or international
donors. We suggest that the formulation of social accountability in terms of a
‘widget’ tends to create conceptual as well as empirical problems in evaluating the
impact that social accountability can have. Focusing on social accountability in this
way depoliticizes the very political processes through which poor people access
services. Second, as an alternative, we propose a conceptualization of social
accountability that focuses on ongoing political engagement by social actors with the
state as a part of a long-term patte rn of interaction shaped both by historical forces
and the current context. Two aspects of this conceptualization are important: first,
the dynamic unfold ing of interactions over time th at reshape both states and
citizens; and second, the unpacking of the actual actions that social actors undertake
in their social accountability work. Viewing social accountability in such a way
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enables us to get some traction on research into two questions that are of interest
to scholars and practitioners: (a) what is the impact of social accountability on
service delivery outcomes (and related how can we measure it?): and (b) why do
social groups undertake social accountability in some contexts and not others?
The article proceeds as follows. The next section briefly examines how the standard
model of public accountability through electoral systems and bureaucracies has failed
poor people in the delivery of services, resulting in the search for a range of alternatives
which are discussed in the third section. The fourth section notes how social
accountability has emerged as a popular way of thinking about direct accountability and
highlights some of the definitional ambiguities in the concept and why they matter. In
the fifth section, we highlight how social accountability has been approached in a
‘widget’ by donors and scholars alike and what problems this poses for assessing its
potential impacts. The sixth section takes up an alternative approach that focuses on the
‘watchdogs’; on the actions that citizens actually undertake. Finally in the concluding
section, we draw out some implications of our alternative approach for measuring
impacts, development policy and practice.
THE STANDARD MODEL OF PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY: DEMOCRACY AND
BUREAUCRACY
Accountability is a means of restraining power. Three core features of accountability
are relevant to our discussion here. First, the need for accountability presumes the
delegation of power. Without such delegation there would be no need for
accountability, each person would act for himself or herself. This aspect of
accountability also i ncorporate s the notion of sanctions if power is delegated, it
can also be taken away. Second, accountability presumes discretion –collectively
formed rules ca nnot cover all contingencies. Tho se that have been delegated
power have been trusted to exercise judgement. Accountability thus calls for
power-holders to explain their actions subject to public reason. Finally,
accountability also presumes opacity that all decisions that are taken will not be
transparent.
The standard model of public accountability that oriented international development
efforts to improve state performance till recently comprised two interconnected
systems of accountability. The model is based on a hard distinction between politics
the making of policy based on normative criteria (what is desirable) and administration,
which fleshes out the technical design and rational execution of those policies. In the
first, citizens delegate to elected political representatives decision-making authority to
govern and make public policy, and exercise control through the institutions of
representative democracy. The primary mechanism citizens have to sanction their
representative’s choices is through periodic elections (Manin et al. 1999; Mainwaring
2003). In the second system, public officials execute policy through public bureaucracy,
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and political leaders exercise control through oversight. Elected representatives
delegate much of their power to public bureaucracy, where the vast majority of
decisions are made to translate broad political agreements into operational policies and
then implementation.
2
The accountability of public agencies is built into the genetic
structure of bureaucracy (Beetham 1996).
Schmitter (2004) expands the standard model in two directions. First, he shifts
attention from accountability spaces vertical and horizontal to the orchestration of
accountability at different phases of the policy process. The form of political
accountability differs at crucial moments of policy making before, during and after.
‘The exchanges of information, justification, and judgment that make up the ordinary
cycle of accountability’, Schmitter (2004: 49) observes, ‘are less obtrusive than the
‘‘big bang’’ of ‘‘throwing the rascals out,’’ but no less real and significant for all
that.’ Second, he draws out the role each of the three principals in public
accountability relations need to play at these moments. For example, citizens
participate in setting the policy agenda (including, but not just, by voting), then ‘pay
attention’ while policy decisions are being made, and finally accept their ‘ob ligation’
to support those decisions (Schmitter 2004: 54). While Schmitter’s model advances
the discussion of political accountability, it is restricted to formal institutions and to
the policy-making process in representative democratic institutions. It therefore leaves
unseen less formal elements of public accountability and leaves public bureaucracy
entirely unattended.
The massive under provision of public services to the poor in most developing
countries, we know, is in some measure a failure of the standard model in those
countries. On the representative democracy side, for elections to function as a source
of accountability, elections must have programmatic parties that compete for the
vote, and public debate has to be unfettered and inclusive. These conditions,
however, are not met in many countries of the South. On the public bureaucracy
side, dissatisfaction is even more widespread. In low- and middle-income countries
bureaucracy is blamed for the poor and discriminatory implementation of services
from which the poor suffer the most. The enormous expansion of the State’s
functions and responsibilities in middle-income countries and some low-income
countries has led to the growth of large, complex and opaque organizations that,
like their counterparts in rich countries, have acquired tremendous discretion in
decision making, are perceived as unaccountable and have become a political force
in their own right.
The limits of the standard model, however, go well beyond the conceptual issues
identified above. As the state has been drawn into providing an ever-expanding array of
services, goods and protections, the ‘chain of delegation’ (Boven 2005) that links
citizens, elected officials, public sector managers and frontline providers has grown
longer, more complex and more tenuous. The vertiginous growth of public
bureaucracy has not been accompanied by a similar growth in democratic control
and the standard model appears increasingly inadequate.
3
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THREE PATHS TO GREATER PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY
Three alternatives to the standard model have gained traction in recent years. The first is
a set of ideas and prescriptions clumped around the idea of ‘managerialism’.
4
Public
accountability is strengthened simultaneously by reducing the role of the public sector
and creating new accountability relations between service providers and consumers or
clients. Managerialism-inspired reforms have focused on market-based mechanisms to
improve public sector performance (Batley 1999). Although many of the reforms were
internal to the public sector (e.g. performance-based pay and contracts) several related
to the way in which public organizations related to their customers, for example citizen
charters, single window cells and complaint hotlines. As argued elsewhere, these are
often oriented towards individuals (rathe r than collective entities) and tend to view
users as fee-paying consumers rather than rights-bearing citizens (Joshi 2008).
In a parallel vein, the World Development Report (WDR) 2004 highlighted the
importance of the short route of accountability (between non-elected public officials/
providers and citizens) making public officials directly answerable to service users. The
diagnosis was that the long route of accountability (via policy makers and politicians)
was not working, so the short route of direct ac countabili ty had to be strengthened.
This additional layer of accountability relations between c onsumers and providers is
an important addition to our conceptual repertoire of public accountability and covers a
phase, that of service delivery, absent from Schmitter’s (2004) model.
This set of reforms, however, often does not address the needs of the poor. Leaving
aside questions about when and where citizens (in general) have a choice of providers in
public services (and are able to absorb the costs of switching) large segments of the rural
and urban poor are not yet consumers of public services. By emphasizing individual over
collective action, managerialism neglects the primary source of bargaining power the
poor enjoy that of numbers and commitment. Finally, it does not address the question
why, given high levels of distrust in the public sector, citizens will bother using new
institutionalized channels of direct accountability, such as consumer complaint systems
(Joshi 2007, 2008).
The second alt ernative is to expand vastly the mechanis ms of public accountability and
increase public sector transparency and openness. This alternative combines new
horizontal accountability relations, for example with the creation of an ombudsman and
independent quasi-legal regulatory bodies, and introducing the right to information and
transparency legislation to give the media, civil society organizations and even individual
citizens greater oversight capaci ty. In this alternative, the new accountability relations
ultimately rely on the sanctions of the standard model. With a few notable exceptions,
the new independent bodies themselves do not impose sanctions on either elected
representatives or public managers and providers. They instead trigger the sanctions
inherent in the standard model public exposure that may result in electoral defeat for
political representatives, legal sanction through the court system or political oversight
and/or sanction through administrative hierarchy.
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The third alternative is participatory democracy. Instead of reducing the policy and
administrative terrain over which control must be exercised, or creating new
accountability relations, the opportunity for citizens to engage directly in different
stages of the policy process and at different levels of public bureaucracy is greatly
expanded. Inn ovative institutions such as governance councils in Brazil or village
assemblies in India are viewed as embodying this spirit (Behar 200 1; Cornwall and
Coelho 2006; Manor 2004). In parallel, social movements are arguing that governments
have an obligation to provide basic services as ‘rights’ that are protected under
constitutions rather than ‘needs’ which were at the discretion of officials to interpret
and fulfil. Advocates of rights-based approaches to basic services identify ways in which
rights can be legislated and progressively achieved, for example in the right to education
or the right to health (Gauri and Brinks 2008). These rights-based, direct democracy
approaches to public accountability are distinct from managerialism in that they
emphasize the collective and public good dimensions of accountability.
SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY: SOME CONCEPTUAL ISSUES
In contr ast to the three paths discussed above, the concept of social accountability offers
a better frame to understand how accountability might operate outside of formal
political systems in the interests of poor people and better public services. So what
exactly is social accountability? Most broadly social accountability is the ongoing
engagement of collective actors in civil society to hold the state to account for failures to
provide public goods. Bypassing the classic forms of accountability such as voting and
more recent additions such as independent auditing processes, and distinct from citizen
participation in the policy making and delivery, these initiatives attempt to use political
and reputational costs to push power holders to respond (Peruzzotti and Smulovitz
2006).
Social accountability initiatives have received much support from donors and civil
society groups and over the past decade there is an accumulated body of experience on
different initiatives in widely varying contexts. Recent reviews of experience with social
accountability initiatives in various regions have now identified over fifty cases across
Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa. More are currently underway through
various international initiatives including projects started under the Department for
International Development (DFID)-funded Global Transparency Fund and Global
Integrity (ComGap 2007; Global Integrity 2010). The documentation of such
experiences is rapidly growing.
This flurry of activity has preceded any consensus on a common definition of social
accountability. Although (or perhaps because) there is a consensus that social
accountability can play an import ant role in improving service delivery, strengthening
governance, reducing corruption and empowering citizens, there is little clarity about
the concept itself and what it means. Two related problems are prevalent.
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First, there is little appreciation of what does not constitute social accountability.
Some scholars take a wide definition that encompasses almost all citizen-engagement
activity. For example Malena et al. (2004: 3) define social accountability as:
an approach towards building accountability that relies on civic engagement, i.e., in which it is ordinary
citizens and/or civil society organizations who participate directly or indirectly in exacting accountability.
Mechanisms of social accountability can be initiated and supported by the state, citizens or both, but very
often they are demand-driven and operate from the bottom–up.
Others limit the use of social accountability to instances of monitoring of the exercise
of public auth ority (Peruzzotti and Smulovitz 2006). Houtzager and Joshi (2008: 3)
define social accountability as ‘the ongoing and collective effort to hold public officials
to account for the provision of public goods which are existing state obligations’.
Labelling both participation in policy processes and participation in accountability
processes as social accountability, underscores the linkages between different types
of citizen action. However, it makes it more difficult to assess the impact of citizen
engagement in accountability processes on service outcomes. In order to isolate the
impacts of social accountability activities from other related actions, it would be
preferable to limit oneself to the narrower definition: that of ensuring the
implementation of existing state obligations. As Joshi (2008) shows, if we consider
this distinction, it becom es clear that not all initiatives labelled as social accountability
perform highly on both dimensions (participation in decision making and participation
in monitoring). In fact some score highly as accountability mechanisms (e.g. report
cards, social audits) while others are more about policy processes (participatory
budgeting, health councils).
Second, although in the broader literature on accountability, there is some consensus
about the range of processes that constitute the ‘package’ of accountability
relationships: (a) an agreed set of standards against which conduct is assessed; (b)
information about the public actions undertaken; (c) justification for those actions; (d)
the imposition of sanctions or rewards as appropriate (Schedler 1999). Yet it is not clear
how these elements interact in practice in the different social accountability initiatives
and which of these is essential to achieving particular outcomes. We will return to these
issues in the concluding section.
One reason for the lack of consensus we believe stems from two quite different
ideological roots of the concept. On the one hand, there are those who start from a
distrust of public officials and focus on creating confrontation between poor performing
public officials and service users through social accountability. For example, community
monitoring assumes that public good providers will misbehave unless constantly
watched and works towards exposing corruption. This line of thinking has its roots in
New Public Management (NPM) which promotes the use of market-based mechanisms
to improve public sector performance through increased responsiveness and
accountability (Batley 1999). Although many of the accountability reforms of NPM
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are internal to the public sector (e.g. performance-based pay and contracts) several
relate to the way in which public organizations related to their customers, for example
citizen charters or/and complaint hotlines. As argued elsewhere, these are often
oriented towards individuals (rather than collective entities) and tend to view users as
fee-paying consumers rather than rights-bearing citizens (Joshi 2008).
On the other hand, there are others who believe in a more trusting, collaborative
approach to resolve issues of poor services through collective deliberation and joint
problem solving. The community score cards initiative is a good example of this in
which widely different perceptions of providers and users about the quality of services
being provided is discussed with an aim towards reaching some agreed solutions. This
kind of approach is rooted in the deepening democracy debates which have focused
on the failure of public institutions to listen to the voices of the poor through
traditional party politics. The result is a promotion of new institutional forms that
attempt to fill this democratic deficit by linking citizens directly with public agencies
(Fung 2001).
While the looseness of de finition generates enthusiasm for this new avenue of holding
public authorities to account, unites civil society organizations in a common quest and
allows observers to make claims a bout its success, the very messiness prevents us from
making a full assessment of the potential for social accountability in different contexts
and when it is likely to be useful (Holland and Thirkell 2009). For those interested in
evidence-based policy, clarifying the conceptual terrain is essential if we are to distil
lessons from social accountability as a potential avenue for improvements in service
delivery.
SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY: THE WIDGET VIEW?
Current conceptualizations of social accountability suffer from what we call the ‘widget’
problem. Even if one narrows down the set of mechanisms currently conceived as social
accountability to those that involve an element of monitoring, the range is quite large
from public expenditure tracking surveys, to community monitoring to citizen report
cards. Much of the (very limited) empirical evidence and analysis comes from social
accountability initiatives that have a structured, institutional form often driven by
external actors. Assuming that the ‘widget’ is what leads to success ignores the range of
contextual and process factors that support the widget (and the processes that comprise
the widget) in the successful cases and enables it to work. In particular political
processes within which widgets are embedded receive less attention. As we argue, it is
those very political processes that lie at the heart of successful accountability actions
from below.
The problems with treating social accountability in this ‘widget’ like fashion are
several. Although these different mechanisms are all grouped as social accountability,
they comprise different elements of the social accountability some, such as
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community monitoring, are expected to work through triggering traditional
accountability mechanisms (particularly those that are focussed on exposing corruption)
(Bjorkman and Svensson 2009; Olken 2007); others such as citizen report cards are
oriented towards naming and shaming public agencies in the expectation that this will
have an effect (Ravindra 2004). As with most social accountability mechanisms, none
have the potential for formal sanctions apart from those achieved through triggering
traditional accountability mechanisms. Thus the mechanisms are quite different in their
underlying theories of change and how they operate. Lumping them together as social
accountability mi ght be misleading in terms of potential for social actio n in different
contexts.
Moreover, because of the different provenance of these mechanisms, they have different
underlying assumptions about the public sector and how it might be reformed. Some, such
as complaint hotlines, or even community monitoring start from an assumption of mistrust
of public agencies, and pitch dissatisfied communities against recalcitrant bureaucrats in a
confrontational fashion. Others more concerned with deepening democracy, such as
governance councils are more likely to approach unsatisfactory performance as a collective
problem requiring joint deliberation and collective solutions. How effective and sustainable
are mechanisms based on distrust between users and providers compared to mechanisms
based on deliberation, the building of trust and joint problem solving? Are certain contexts
more supportive of particular mechanisms? These questions are critical for understanding
when such mechanisms are likely to work, yet we have little evidence for answering these
questions.
Further, the mechanisms by themselves do not address the question of how capacity
for responsiveness within the public sector is to be built. Our own research and that of
others suggests that social accountability in the form of demand side pressures by itself
is unlikely to be su ccessful. Successful cases rely heavily on reforms or support from the
supply side in the form of reformist bureaucrats, alliances across the public–private
divide and changes in the broader incentives within which the public sector operates
(CFS 2010; Booth 2011).
These problems are compounded by the empirical evidence of the impacts of social
accountability that is plagued by three limitations. First, it is only recently that scholars
have started looking systematically at evidence of impact. The evidence appears to be of
varied robustness from anecdotal claims of impact, to strictly designed randomized
controlled trials of specific, often narrowly defined interventions. There are very few
ex-post independent studies of accountability initiatives, and particularly on impacts in
the service delivery arena (Joshi 2010; McGee and Gaventa 2010).
Second, the available literature has tended to examine social accountability initiatives
in a ‘snapshot’ fashion often limiting the analysis to the intervention itself and its
subsequent unfolding of outcomes through quasi-experimental research such as
randomized control trials (Nguyen and Lassibille 2008; Banerjee et al. 2010). So, for
example, Reinikka and Svensson (2005) show how the dissemination of information
through Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys has had an impact: schools in
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communities that had better access to information received more of the funding that
was due to them. Yet, later research has questioned this simplistic conclusion and
shown that other reforms within the education system have contributed to
improvements in transmission of funds (Hubbard 2007). Most studies do not examine
a longer trajectory of citizen–state relationships or civil society networks that underpin
specific social accountability initiatives, neither do they examine the influence of
activities outside the narrow scope of the initiative (whether citizen or state-led)
that can influence outcomes. Partly, the reason for this is that a large proportion of
social accountability experience that is reported in the literature has been externally
driven and is circumscribed by specific project cycles. And, taking this narrow focus
hides a more substantial gap we do not really have an understanding of why social
accountability demands emerge in some settings and not in others, why some
collective actors engage in soc ial accountability activities at specific points of time.
In other words, we do not have a theory that explains the origins of social
accountability in practice.
A third, but less immediate, issue is that most of the available evidence on social
accountability initiatives has focused on citizen-led action targeted at the state and state
providers. As a fi rst cut, this focus on state providers is appropriate and often easier.
However, we know that increasingly the state is only one of an array of legitimate
actors who exercise public authority and influence development. With the growing
fragmentation of the state through decentralization, contracting out and privatization,
providers of public services (for which the state is ultimately responsible) are often non-
state actors. The result is a growing disjuncture between traditional accountability
mechanisms and the new forms of pluralistic governance (Scott 2000). Despite this
changing context, we have little understanding of social accountability initiatives when
they target the diverse set of non-state actors.
In sum, by treating social accountability initiatives like widgets to improve services,
we ignore the broader socio-political context within which these widgets work or do
not work the history of the long-term processes of political bargaining, public–social
movement alliances, previous experiences of citizen engagement and the networks
within which collective actors (the agents for social accountability) are embedded.
SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY: DEMAND FROM BELOW?
Given these limitations of existing concepts and approaches, how can we advance our
understanding of social accountability in ways that enable us to make progress on two
critical questions: (1) why do collective actors embark on social accountability actions
to improve basic services in some contexts and not others; and (2) how can we measure
the impact of social accountability in the wide range of settings where widgets are not
prevalent? We do not yet understand the origins of social accountability action
differences in motives, incentives and histories of collective actors in different contexts
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can lead to the same intervention having different outcomes. As Khemani (2008) points
out, community engagement with information in Uganda and India led to completely
different results. We know however, that citizen groups throughout the world engage
in social accountability actions, making demands for better services, holding protests
and engaging in dialogue with providers, even in settings without ‘widget’ like
interventions. In fact, such varying degrees of action are the norm, rather than widgets.
So the question is: how can we best encapsulate such action and the conditions under
which it can have impact?
In this section we tentatively pull together elements of a somewhat different
approach that might help advance answers to these questions. The approach locates
social accountability as a part of the iterative patterns of state–society relations and their
evolution over tim e. The focus is squarely on citizens as collective actors: the
‘watchdogs’ of the title. This approach diffe rs from others in two key features: (1) it
takes a dynamic, long-term view on how social accountability emerges and has impact;
and (2) it disaggregates social accountability into its constituent parts, each of which can
have distinct dynamics. We take each of these in turn.
Adynamicview
One of the key features of the approach we suggest is to examine social accountability
actions as one part of a broader and longer process of engagement between collective
actors and the state. Collective actors such as advocacy NGOs, social movements and
neighbourhood associations pursue multiple goals and use a variety of strategies to
influence processes of public policy and execution of policy. The actions that, when
taken together, we call social accountability, are almost always part of broader
strategies that traverse multiple institutional or non-institutional public arenas
collective actors in cities like urban centres of Latin America or South Asia may attempt
to influence several moments of the policy process, for example by lobbying legislative
bodies or engaging in media campaigns. At the same time, they may also use local
participatory institutions or informal governance institutions to hold public sector
managers or providers accountable for full execution of the very policies that are
seeking to modify.
In our view, this social action is shaped in part by the legacies of previous
engagement between these collective actor and state actors. As Skocpol (1992)
suggests, each iteration of this engagement alters the capabilities of the actors and
sometimes the political institutional landscape in which the next engagement will take
place. Although social action at th e local level is often ongoing and incremental, it is
more likely to have an impact at moments of opportunity (which are often labelled as
such post hoc). These moments can emerge as a result of external initiatives, such as
public sector reforms, or political crises that shake loose the commitment of important
actors to a particular set of policies or related institutional arrangements, or lead new
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influential actors to enter a policy domain, including the introduction of widgets. At
such moments, the possibilities for change are heightened either through some
combination of favourable refr aming of issues, availability of new institutional spaces or
the creation of new alliances that empower hitherto weaker actors.
Whether these moments of opportunity veer collective actors towards heightening
social accountability action (accompanied by actions such as policy advocacy, co-
production, etc.) depends on the context and the capacities and repertoires of the
actors. For collective actors, engaging in social accountability action diverts resources
from other activities that they may consider as having more potential for success.
Moreover, social accountability activity might be difficult if collective actors are
engaged in other forms of engagement with the state (e.g. holding contracts for service
provision). Th ese issues are particularly pertinent when one looks closely at the
conditions under which collective actors actually undertake social accountability.
By tracing the extent to which collective actors engage in social accountability actions
over time, one can trace the evolution of citizen–state interactions around
accountability including whether previous actions elicited positive or negative responses
from the state.
5
We can also understand the conditions under which state actors are
likely to respond for example if they have the required resources and capacity, if they
are well linked to social actors, if they are the subject of trust. Detailed analysis of
empirical cases of successful and unsuccessful action can help unpack key elements of
the state–society relationships that seem critical to success.
6
For example, a long period
of activism by the Mazdoor Kisaan Shakti Sangathana (MKSS), a landless labourer and
small farmer solidarity movement led to the passage of the Right to Information in India
and consequently to the institutionalization of a new form of social accountability the
social audit that originated in organically evolved ‘public hearings’.
7
The relative
porousness of the state, the surface of the state through which it interact s with social
actors, the networks, hierarchy, organization and points of access to the state of civil
society all become important dimensions of assessing the potential for social
accountability to emerge and be successful.
Elements of accountability
Another feature of our approach is to disaggregate social accountability actions into
component parts. This is particularly important because unlike widgets which come
with a package of action elements (for example, social audits comprise of collecting
information, holding a public hearing, etc.), social accountability activities seen as
regular politics require collective actors to choose what activities they invest in, and
there are trade-offs involved. Assessing the extent to which collective actors engage in
these activities and their influence on the quality of services over a sustained period of
time offers a way of potentially isolating the impacts of particular actions over others
for example does collective protest work better than engaging in grievance
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mechanisms? It seems obvious that, whether collective actors engage in particular
actions will depend on the institutional context, overall patterns of state–society
relations as well as responses to previous periods of social accountability activities.
Our starting point for examining exactly what actions on the part of collective actors
might con stitute social accountability is to revisit the basic elements of social
accountability drawing on Schedler (1999) setting standards, accessing information,
seeking justification, rendering judgement and imposing sanctions. In order to
concretize the elements of social accountability, we can break them down into the
following five actions.
8
The first two relate to accessing information. The first action involves requesting
information about the level and quality of services being provided. The information
required is often as much about the legal standards of expected provision as about the
level of services actually being provided. Often entitlements to basic services are not
explicit in policies, or widely known by recipients. That is why information campaigns
often accompany many social accountability mechanisms and are prior to any
community action. However, as many observers have pointed out, the availability of
information by itself is not enough to spur action (Fox 2007).
The second is the ongoing monitoring by social actors of the quality of the actual
services being delivered. Are social workers regularly attending their duties? Are
teachers absent from their classes? Are medicines available in sufficient quantities? These
questions are best asked by those who are close to the services in question and in a
position to monitor performance on a regular basis.
Related to the second, the third action relates to demanding justification. It involves
making demands to enforce legal standards that are not currently being met. For
example, communities may demand more doctors in a health post if it does not meet
the established norm for the ratio of the number of doctors to the population served.
This is an important element of social accountabil ity: to give governments opportunities
to remed y the situation when suitably informed or provide credible explanations of why
the standards cannot be met.
The last two involve rendering judgements. The fourth, involves collectively invoking
formal grievance procedures –eitherthroughexistingadministrativecomplaint
mechanisms, or often as a last resort engaging in court cases ag ainst the government
for non-fulfilment of legal obligations. Increasingly in developing countries, public
interest litigation is being used as a collective mechanism to signal the seriousness of the
grievances to the authorities and also seek redress from the judiciary, in the expecta tion
that it is independent of the executive.
The fifth and final, is holding demonstrations to protest against the po or quality of
services. Social accountability involves rendering judgement: making dissatisfaction with
the quality of services ‘public’, engaging the attention of the media and naming and
shaming poor providers.
9
All these actions of social accountability have a common core: they are underta ken
collectively through mobilizing the grassroots; they involve making demands for
Joshi & Houtzager: Widgets or watchdogs? 157
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information and failures of services ‘public’; and expect to work through imposing
political and reputational costs (Peruzzotti and Smulovitz 2006).
10
By tracing these
actions and their impacts over time, one might be able to come t o a more nuanced
understanding of the conditions under which social accountability works and why.
Our research suggests that collective actors in Sa˜o Paolo and Delhi prioritize
different actions because of differences in context. In Delhi, monitoring of public
services and invoking formal grievance procedures seems to be widespread, whereas
collective actors in Sa˜o Paolo are more likely to raise questions about the level of
services in deliberative institutions such as health councils. The rationale for the
divergent strategies is rooted in the different histories of interaction with the state.
The extent to which each will succeed in its particular setting depends upon a
range of factors, one of which we found was the linkages that local collective
actors had to national policy networks. While these findings are preliminary and
emerge from a comparison of two settings, they illustrate the insights that could be
pursued to understand the potential for social accountability in a wide variety of
contexts.
CONCLUSIONS: AN AGENDA FOR RESEARCH
Social accountability work is currently facing a cross-roads. On the one hand, scholars
could continue to invest in expanding the number of robust studies and build the
evidence base for conditions under which the different widgets work. This is the path
that a lot of research currently underway is already taking. However, this path is
resource intensive, and the payoff seems located in the distant future. The other path
involves examining closely the evolution of citizen engagement over time in the kinds of
context that we are interested in intervening in. This is more likely to give us clues as to
how and when social accountability in particular settings will emerge and work to lead
to responsive public officials and improved public services. In supporting the latter path,
we argue in this article that the prevailing approach to social accountability ignores
political realities of context in emphasizing the widgets at the e xpense of th e watchdogs.
The watchdog approach is more rooted in the organic politics of particular contexts.
We highlighted that two aspects are important, understanding the dynamics over time
and disaggregating social accountability actions to understand levels, tradeoffs and
impacts. Dynamics are essential for sorting out the directionality of causes and effects
such as whether engagement in social accountability action leads to empowerment or do
empowered communities tend to undertake social accountability action. By examining
such action over time, we can also assess the effects on levels of social accountability
that reforms might have. The disaggregation of actions is important to understand the
conditions under which collective actors undertake certain kinds of social accountability
over others. We can also attempt to understand whether social accountability actions
crowd-in or crowd-out other forms of citizen engagement.
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These goals can be achieved through a potentially simple task by institutionalizing
the collection of collective action data in different contexts over time.
11
In a context
where increasingly surveys are conducted about various aspects of political life (voting
behaviour, trust in government, happiness and well-being, levels of social capital, etc.)
it is not unthinkable to begin collection of a com parative data set on collective citizen
engagement. The difference between this data set and regular surveys would be the
emphasis on the collective (rather than the individual). Such a data set can help us form
an aggregate picture of how levels of direct engagement work in various contexts.
Complemented by careful qualitative research of comparative longitudinal case studies
we are likely to have a better understanding of how citizens act, when they do and
when they are likely to be successful.
The approach highl ighted here has drawbacks. It does not offer the kind of quick and
easy answers sought by donors looking to support demands for good governance from
below. The widget approach is more amenable to that. However, the approach outlined
here can be used to gain insights into contexts in which particular widgets are likely to
work. And that promises to be an important step in the right direction.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research was funded by the DFID funded Centre for the Future State, Institute of
Development Studies at the University of Sussex. We are grateful for insights to our
research team Julia Moretto Amancio, Aheli Chowdhury, Monika Dowbor and Arnab
Acharya with whom these ideas were developed. We also thank Mick Moore and two
anonymous reviewers for comments.
NOTES
1Thesestudiesevaluateaslightlydifferentsetofinitiativesthatoverlapwithsocialaccountabilityasdenedin
this article for example ‘voice and accountability’, ‘citizen action’, ‘transparency and accountability’ and
‘citizen engagement’.
2Legislativeoversightprovidesameasureofaccountabilityofpublicbureaucracytotheirelectedbosses.
3 The long Third Wave of democratization in middle- and low-income countries, where the tyranny of
political elites and public officialdom has often been most acute (e.g. South Korea, Brazil, Indonesia, Egypt,
Thailand), has also highlighted that there is no inherent sympathy between representative democracy and
public bureaucracy. Dictatorship and bureaucracy are perfectly compatible.
4 Managerialism is a view of the role the public sector should play in society and a broad set of related
principles and prescriptions (Bresser Pereira and Spink 1999), many of which are described as a part of the
New Public Management (NPM).
5Theimportanceoftrustinthestateisanimportantelementofshapingresponse.SeeRothsteinandStolle
(2008).
6 We have attempted to do this in a project that sought to assess the impact of state-led reforms
(decentralization, pluralization and participation) on the ability of social actors to demand accountability for
the provision of primary health care and social assistance in the cities of New Delhi and Brazil (Houtzager
Joshi & Houtzager: Widgets or watchdogs? 159
Downloaded by [Peter Houtzager] at 01:04 26 September 2012
et al. 2008). The task was to measure the extent of social accountability actions in approximately forty
neighbourhoods in each city (Houtzager and Acharya 2008). We also measured the quality of services with
the idea of exploring the question: do social accountability actions ultimately have impact? If yes, under what
conditions are they likely to do so? The complexities and findings of that analysis will be the subject of
another article; here we highlight the challenges and contributions of such an approach.
7 For a good analysis of the evolution of the right to information and social audits see Pande (forthcoming).
8 We have set aside the issue of setting standards in this analysis of social accountability because for the most
part it occurs through a separate political process. We also set aside the issue of sanctions because social
accountability works through imposing political and reputational sanctions and sometimes through the
triggering of traditional sanctions. These elements of social accountability actions were collectively distilled
through extensive discussion by the full research team.
9 One might ask, how does one place boundaries on the concept of social accountability? We posit that social
accountability fits between formal, institutionalized accountability (such as through electoral processes) and
contentious collective action. Contentious collective action disrupts accepted frames of behaviour while
challenging the state. Social accountability actors use some of the strategies of contentious collective action
(e.g. mobilization, framing, etc.) but seek to realize legal entitlements; partially disrupting public action, to
ensure its better working. Further, institutionalization of social accountability processes themselves is one of
the goals of social accountability action. At times it has been successful as in the case of the incorporation of
social audits (which emerged from informal public hearings) into the national employment programme
(NREGA) in India (Pande, forthcoming).
10 While mobilizing communities and discussing the desired and existing level of services is a prior part of social
accountability activities, we do not accord it a separate action as such demonstrations could be related to
participating in policy-making activities. Social accountability in our view does not include demands to change
standards (as that is part of the political processes surrounding policy making), however, we do include actions
that might in extreme cases demonstrate the moral unacceptability of prevailing standards and processes. That
is because social accountability focuses on outcomes of public policies, not on whether appropriate procedures
were followed. The example of the Right to Food case in India is illustrative: the People’s Union for Civil
Liberties filed a case against the Government of India holding it responsible for starvation deaths in a context
where the Government had millions of tonnes of food grains in storage viewing it as moral outrage.
11 The Modes of Collective Action, Service Delivery and Social Accountability project devised a methodology
for operationalizing social accountability in surveys at the local level (see Houtzager and Acharya 2008).
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... Answerability is a mandate imposed on duty-bearers to describe and justify their actions, typically within multi-stakeholder spaces [34]. Enforceability is the ability to use penalties, whether reputational, administrative or legal [35], to support the implementation of desired actions or remedies. CLM uses data and advocacy to drive duty-bearers to respond to community needs and holds accountable those they have authority over. ...
... Notably, while duty-bearers may seek to exert control over CLM narratives and methods, often to avoid public criticism, challenges to community leadership of programmes are often driven by misconceptions of the model. This is often due to stakeholders misunderstanding the fundamental role of community leadership in social accountability initiatives, due to perceiving CLM as monitoring and evaluation (M&E), a traditional service improvement intervention or research [24,35,41]. While CLM and M&E are both concerned with measuring facets of healthcare delivery, CLM emphasizes a community-owned, participatory process of gathering information to advocate for greater accountability of health systems to communities. ...
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This book brings together studies on democratic accountability in Latin America by authors from different theoretical perspectives. It seeks to further understanding on the web of institutions that form the mechanisms of accountability, the interaction between these institutions, and interaction between electoral accountability, intrastate accountability, and societal oversight. The book is divided into four parts. Part I discusses conceptual and theoretical issues on accountability. Part II presents three chapters on legislatures, executives, and oversight agencies. Part III has three chapters on the judiciary and related mechanisms of accountability. Part IV deals with innovations in oversight of public officials.
Book
This book is a first-of-its-kind, five-country empirical study of the causes and consequences of social and economic rights litigation. Detailed studies of Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and South Africa present systematic and nuanced accounts of court activity on social and economic rights in each country. The book develops new methodologies for analyzing the sources of and variation in social and economic rights litigation, explains why actors are now turning to the courts to enforce social and economic rights, measures the aggregate impact of litigation in each country, and assesses the relevance of the empirical findings for legal theory. This book argues that courts can advance social and economic rights under the right conditions precisely because they are never fully independent of political pressures. © Cambridge University Press 2008 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Article
The issue of this article is how much the electoral mechanism can effectively make the institutions of democracy more representative. The authors single out some critical limitations for the constituents to enhance controlling mechanisms over their representatives.
Chapter
This book brings together studies on democratic accountability in Latin America by authors from different theoretical perspectives. It seeks to further understanding on the web of institutions that form the mechanisms of accountability, the interaction between these institutions, and interaction between electoral accountability, intrastate accountability, and societal oversight. The book is divided into four parts. Part I discusses conceptual and theoretical issues on accountability. Part II presents three chapters on legislatures, executives, and oversight agencies. Part III has three chapters on the judiciary and related mechanisms of accountability. Part IV deals with innovations in oversight of public officials.
Book
Sumario: Managerial Public Administration: strategy and structure for a new state -- On the design of the state: a principal-agent perspective -- The global revolution: reforming government-sector management -- The complementarity of economic restructuring and rebuilding the state in Latin America -- Possibilities and political imperatives: sevently years of administrative reform in Latin America -- From bureaucratic to managerial Public Administration -- Democratic governability in Latin America at the end of the twentieth century