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| 1 |
ID:
117526
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
International aid agencies are increasingly placing social accountability at the heart of their governance reform programs, involving a range of social activist mechanisms through which officials are rendered answerable to the public. Crucially, aid agencies are not just promoting these mechanisms in emerging democracies, but now also in authoritarian societies. What then are the likely political regime effects of these mechanisms? We approach this by examining who supports social accountability, why, and the implications for political authority. Focusing on the Philippines and Cambodia cases, it is argued that, to differing degrees, social accountability mechanisms have been subordinated to liberal and/or moral ideologies favoring existing power hierarchies. These ideologies often privilege nonconfrontational state-society partnerships, drawing activists into technical and administrative processes limiting reform possibilities by marginalizing, or substituting for, independent political action pivotal to the democratic political authority of citizens.
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| 2 |
ID:
143570
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| Summary/Abstract |
The disappointing performance of conventional public sector reforms in developing countries has led to the rise of ‘new’ approaches seeking to overcome traditional bureaucratic barriers to change: leadership-focused interventions like the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI); accountability-focused initiatives like the Open Government Partnership (OGP); and adaptation-focused models like those of Africa Power and Politics (APP). While these approaches are appealing to aid donors in their promise to move beyond the limitations of purely formal institution building, they fail to provide new answers to the ‘old’ analytical and practical challenges of public sector reform, in particular administrative patrimonialism, public corruption and political capture. The evidence is yet inchoate, but all points to the need for these approaches to work together with conventional ones. Beyond novel implementation tactics, however, there is a need for new strategies of sustained political support for embattled reformers who face powerful incentives against institutional change.
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| 3 |
ID:
173791
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| Summary/Abstract |
The uneven implementation of innovations in social accountability across China remains an empirical puzzle. Most existing research focuses on the procedural design of participatory mechanisms but does not discuss how they came about in the first place. Drawing on fieldwork data from several sites that experiment with the public supervision of local governments, this article examines the contextual factors that affect the emergence of social accountability innovations in China. This article argues that for an innovation in social accountability to emerge successfully, initiatives between the local state and citizens must be aligned. Three factors are found to be crucial: (1) social momentum for accountability; (2) the presence of backers at the elite level; and (3) an authentic opening for mobilization. The empirical findings reported here have important implications for the study of social accountability innovation in China and for participatory reforms more generally.
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