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Social accountability has become increasingly important to development programming since the 2004 World Development Report spearheaded its first generation of programming. In 2016, Thomas Carothers synthesized global experts’ perspectives on what became known as the second generation. With an evolving global context, new research and evaluations and tacit knowledge on how those assumptions played out in practice, the time is ripe for asking what the evidence since 2004 can tell us about what...

When social accountability interventions scale up and their sustainability depends on the interactions of many agents and system components, related results are rarely observable at the end of an intervention. The 2019 OECD Development Assistance Committee’s (OECD DAC) revamped evaluations criteria for assessing sustainability acknowledges that such results are often emergent, and should be monitored and evaluated with this in mind. It therefore emphasizes a turn towards assessing complex...

Advocacy for public accountability aims to produce certain reactions from government officials or service providers. However, the reactions can be many and diverse, and it is not always clear to advocates how to interpret them and decide on next steps—whether to intensify efforts or back off; continue the same strategy or make adjustments. This paper presents a framework to help accountability advocates and practitioners interpret government reactions to their efforts and move forward...

This note presents the key components of a potential next generation of social accountability programming. The key aspects outlined emerge from a review of over 150 cases as well as tacit knowledge from dozens of practitioners (Guerzovich and Aston, 2023).The main thread of social accountability 3.0 and what distinguishes it from previous generations is a focus on its contribution towards more responsive systems and accountable social contracts. In particular, social accountability should be...

This study mainly aimed to look at adaptive management in the program cycle (throughout Program Cycle processes, including strategy, project, and activity design and implementation) and to look at the Enabling Conditions: how an organization’s culture, business processes, and resource allocation support adaptive management. It explores elements of adaptive management that correspond to the objectives of the study as follows: 1) Assess grantees’ level of understanding of adaptive management...

“Civic tech” broadly refers to the use of digital technologies to support a range of citizen engagement processes. From allowing individuals to report problems to local government to enabling the crowdsourcing of national legislation, civic tech aims to promote better policies and services – while contributing to more inclusive democratic institutions. But could civic tech affect public issues in a way that benefits some and excludes others? Over the decades, the question of who...

Executive Summary Understanding how civil society can get government to respond to their needs, preferences and demands, and deliver goods and services to citizens is a central concern in social accountability initiatives. It is widely argued that sanctions make a key difference to service delivery outcomes, and that without them, transparency and accountability interventions are less likely to be effective and less likely to be sustainable (Anderson et al., 2020; Arugay, 2016; Fox, 2020;...

If you just remember these... If you can avoid building it, don’t build it; if you have to build it, hire a CTO, ship early, and mature long; and no matter what, draw on a trusted crew, build lean and fast, and get close to and build with your users as soon as possible. --- This guide aims to help you avoid bad projects, structure the team right, ship and learn quicker, and mature longer. The guide starts with project selection, including why the best project to select is no project at...

Tal vez como nunca en la historia, la democracia está siendo desafiada. A los viejos problemas, muchos no resueltos, se les agregan otros, surgidos de la incorporación de tecnología, de la emergencia de nuevos actores sociales y de una conformación de la subjetividad política cada vez más compleja e impredecible. Esta investigación pretende reactualizar algunos de los debates clásicos sobre la democracia y, al mismo tiempo, sentar una base empírica que permita pensar de qué modo la...

Considerations on where and when sanctions fit into the conception of social accountability is a nudge toward better and more granular descriptions of what work is being undertaken effectively in which situations.

Based on its work in Sri Lanka, The Asia Foundation argues for greater attention to the local political dynamics into which digital solutions are introduced

Development donors invest significantly in governance reform, including in contexts characterised by conflict and fragility. However, there is relatively little comparative study of their change strategies, and little understanding of what works and why. This paper explores the strategies of six recent DFID-funded programmes in Mozambique, Myanmar, and Pakistan with empowerment and accountability aims. Document review and field interviews are used to analyse the application of multi-scalar...

This paper analyzes the award-winning e-participation initiative of the city council of Madrid, Decide Madrid, to identify the critical success factors and the main barriers that are conditioning its performance. An exploratory case study is used as a research technique, including desk research and semi-structured interviews. The analysis distinguishes contextual, organizational and individual level factors; it considers whether the factors or barriers are more related to the information and...

The recent rapid evolution of digital technologies has been changing behaviors and expectations in countries around the world. These shifts make it the right time to pose the key question this paper explores: Will digital technologies, both those that are already widespread and those that are still emerging, have substantial impacts on the way citizens engage and the ways through which power is sought, used, or contested? The authors address this question both to mitigate some of the World...

This paper analyses the award-winning e-participation initiative of the city council of Madrid, Decide Madrid, to discover the critical success factors at contextual, organizational and individual level. This analysis is carried out with desk research and semi-structured interviews. Results show that the most relevant success factors are the socio-economic context, the commitment of the city council, the method used to recruit the workers and the knowledge of senior managers about citizen...

Adaptive Management involves a dynamic interaction between three elements: delivery, programming and governance. This case study focuses on a large DfID governance project, the Institutions for Inclusive Development (I4ID), a five-year initiative in Tanzania. The study forms part of a research project to examine whether and how adaptive approaches can strengthen aid projects promoting empowerment and accountability in fragile, conflict and violence-affected settings (FCVAS). The research...

This paper explores the nature, role and dynamics of new forms of social and political action as pathways to empowerment and accountability in fragile conflict- and violence-affected settings in Africa. Through an in-depth analysis of the case of the Bring Back Our Girls (#BBOG) movement in Nigeria and a multi-methods approach, the paper provides new knowledge that addresses evidence gaps in the following areas: (1) the multiple ways through which social and political action play out in...

Fragile, conflict and violence-affected settings (FCVAS) are messy and ambiguous contexts in which to plan and implement development initiatives. To work there, external actors are increasingly adopting an adaptive approach to empowerment and accountability (E&A) programming, whatever the setting. This means using a compass rather than map, where real-time political economy analysis (PEA) in relation to context and programme monitoring and evidence-informed learning in relation to...

The Laboratory of Collective Intelligence for Participatory Democracy (2016-2019) is a project that arose out of Medialab Prado in coordination with the Government Area of Citizen Participation, Transparency and Open Government of the city of Madrid. Its work has been very connected with the analysis, reflection and innovation found on the digital participation platform Decide Madrid. The project has also organised many workshops and conferences that have brought together hundreds of people...

How and to what degree is the World Bank putting its new institutional citizen engagement (CE) commitments into practice? This question guides an independent assessment that the Accountability Research Center (ARC) at American University has undertaken as part of the Institute of Development Studies-led Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) research programme’s investigation into how external actors can best support local processes of and conditions for empowerment and...