Social Accountability: A Concept Note Based on Emerging Practice

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Social AccountabilityA Concept Note Based on
Emerging Practice

• January 26, 2004
• Carmen Malena, Consultant
• Participation Civic Engagement Team World Bank

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Social Accountability

• Accountability can be defined as the obligation
  of power-holders to account for or take
  responsibility for their actions.
• Social accountability is 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.

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Public officials and bureaucrats can be held
accountable for their
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Social accountability mechanisms

• can serve to complement and/or reinforce
  conventional internal or horizontal
  accountability systems.

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Some examples of social accountability mechanisms

• citizen participation in public policy-making
• citizen juries
• participatory budgeting
• participatory monitoring committees
• participatory expenditure tracking
• social audits
• community scorecards
• citizen advisory boards
• lobbying and advocacy campaigns

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Why Social Accountability?

• Good governance
• crisis of legitimacy
• ineffective formal mechanisms of accountability
• Increased development effectiveness
• public service delivery failures
• non-transparent policy formulation
• Empowerment
• poor peoples dissatisfaction with
  accounta-bility/ responsiveness of state
  institutions
• aggregate and amplify voice

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Social accountabilitylinks with other key
concepts
Democracy/ citizenship
Civil society
Participatory development
Transparency/ Anti-corruption
Rights
Decentralization/ public sector reform
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Application contexts for social accountability

• PRS preparation, implementation, monitoring
  evaluation
• public sector reform/ public expenditure
  management processes
• sectoral interventions
• community driven development projects

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Participatory Public Expenditure Management
Budget Formulation Porto Alegre, Brazil
Budget Review Analysis IDASA, South Africa
Performance Monitoring Filipino Citizen Report
Card
Civic Engagement
Budget/Expenditure Tracking Uganda PETS
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Building Blocks of SA
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Critical Factors of Success

• Political context and culture
• The role of the media
• Civil society capacity
• State capacity
• State-civil society synergy
• Institutionalization