Abstract
Summary Empirical evidence of tangible impacts of social accountability initiatives is mixed. This meta-analysis reinterprets evaluations through a new lens: the distinction between tactical and strategic approaches to the promotion of citizen voice to contribute to improved public sector performance. Field experiments study bounded, tactical interventions based on optimistic assumptions about the power of information alone, both to motivate collective action and to influence the state. Enabling environments for collective action combined with bolstered state capacity to respond to citizen voice are more promising. Sandwich strategies can help ‘voice’ and ‘teeth’ to become mutually empowering, through state–society synergy.
Highlights
Social accountability strategies try to improve institutional performance by bolstering both citizen engagement and the public responsiveness of states and corporations
Insofar as social accountability builds citizen power vis-‐à-‐ vis the state, it is a political process – yet it is distinct from political accountability, which focuses on elected officials and where citizen voice is often delegated to representatives in between elections
Strategic approaches to Social accountability (SAcc), in contrast, focus on disseminating information that is clearly perceived by users as actionable, in coordination with measures that actively enable collective action, influence service provider incentives and/or share power over resource allocation
Summary
Social accountability strategies try to improve institutional performance by bolstering both citizen engagement and the public responsiveness of states and corporations. Social accountability (SAcc) is an evolving umbrella category that includes: citizen monitoring and oversight of public and/or private sector performance, user-‐centered public information access/dissemination systems, public complaint and grievance redress mechanisms, as well as citizen participation in actual resource allocation decision-‐making, such as participatory budgeting Amidst this diverse array of ongoing experimentation (at both small and large scale), analysts are beginning to note the differences between limited tools for civil society monitoring and voice and broader public interest advocacy approaches for policy reform (e.g., Joshi and Houtzager 2012). Tactical SAcc approaches are bounded interventions ( known as tools) and they are limited to “society-‐side” efforts to project voice Their theory of change assumes that access to information alone will motivate localized collective action, which will in turn generate sufficient power to influence public sector performance.. The concluding proposition for discussion is that ‘sandwich strategies’ of mutually empowering coalitions of pro-‐ accountability actors in both state and society can trigger the virtuous circles of mutual empowerment that are needed to break out of ‘low-‐accountability traps.’
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