State-Society Synergy for Accountability: Lessons for the World Bank

W O R L D B A N K W O R K I N G P A P E R N O .
3 0
State-Society Synergy
for Accountability
Lessons for the World Bank
THE WORLD BANK

W O R L D B A N K W O R K I N G P A P E R N O . 3 0
State-Society Synergy
for Accountability
Lessons for the World Bank
THE WORLD BANK

Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2004
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

State-society synergy for accountability: lessons for the World Bank.
p. cm.—(World Bank working paper; no. 30)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8213-5831-6
1. Developing countries—Economic policy—Citizen participation. 2. Economic
development—Social aspects—Developing countries. 3. Political ethics—Developing
countries. 4. Responsibility—Developing countries. 5. Developoing countries—Politics and
government—21st century. 6. Civil society—Developing countries. 7. World Bank.
I. World Bank. II. Series.
HC59.7.S7587 2004
352.3'5—dc22 2004042227
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments v
Executive Summary 1
1. Economic Development and Good Government 3
2. Accountability and Civil Society 7
3. Case Studies 13
Case #1: Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil 14
Case #2: Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute 17
Case #3: Police and School Reform in Chicago 23
Case #4: Decentralization and Rural Development in Mexico 25
Case #5: Toxics Release Inventory in the United States 28
Case #6: Women’s Police Stations in Brazil 31
Case #7: Grass-Roots Anti-Corruption Initiatives in India 33
4. Lessons for the World Bank 37
5. Conclusion 43
Annexes
A. Summary of Case Studies 45
B. Summary of Lessons for World Bank Staff 49
Bibliography 51
TABLE
Table 1: Four Dimensions of State Capacity 4
FIGURE
Figure 1: Accountability and Civil Society 11
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T his report benefited from comments by Jonathan Fox, David de Ferranti, Katherine Bain,
Linn Hammergren, Patti Petesch, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Catalina Smulovitz, Michael Wal-
ton, Ernesto May, and the members of the LCR Public Sector Group.
v
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
T
he contemporary era of globalization and market liberalization by no means implies the
end of the state. The institutional, technical, administrative and political capacities of the
state are now as important as they ever have been. Good government continues to be an
absolutely necessary prerequisite for successful economic growth in the developing world.
One of the most effective ways to strengthen the basic capacities of the state is through the
construction of an honest, efficient, and effective (or, in other words, accountable) bureaucratic
apparatus. This task should be at the top of the agenda for almost all states. How can this be done?
There are two general strategies for the achievement of this task. One option is to strengthen
the “command-and-control” elements of government. The alternative is for governments to open
up their bureaucracies to pressure “from below.” This involves constructing a healthy relationship
between state and society so that social actors and individual citizens are empowered to oblige
the government to uphold the rule of law and fulfill its promises.
Although the top-down approach is clearly important and necessary in most countries of the
developing world, especially given the chronic weakness of their bureaucratic apparatuses, the focus
of this paper is on the latter approach. Specifically, how can the relationship between state and
society be transformed from a process of particularistic demands, concessions and manipulations to
a healthy engagement that produces a solid bureaucratic apparatus and policy outcomes that are in
the interest of the public as a whole? This is the central question that guides the study below.
The paper first surveys the literature on accountability and establishes a categorization of the
different ways by which civil society can interact with the state in order to improve accountability.
It then explores in detail seven case studies of successful experiences of “state-society synergy for
accountability.” The studies draw from a wide range of different contexts (Brazil, India, Mexico,
the United States) and from a variety of different areas of government activity (corruption control,
environmental regulation, poverty reduction, election monitoring, infrastructure provision, school
reform, police reform).
1
2 WORLD BANK WORKING PAPER
The paper concludes with a series of conceptual and practical lessons for World Bank staff on
how best to initiate, design, and implement successful pro-accountability mechanisms grounded
in state-society synergy. Some of the most important lessons include the need to fully institution-
alize participative mechanisms, to involve societal actors from the very beginning of the design
stage of the process, to open up participation to a wide diversity of social and political actors, and
to complement decentralization with centralized supervision.
In the end, this paper argues that marketization is not the only way to tap into the energy of
society for the improvement of governance. Instead of sending sections of the state off to society,
it is often even more fruitful to invite society into the inner chambers of the state.
CHAPTER 1
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
AND GOOD GOVERNMENT
The agonies of collapsed states such as Liberia and Somalia demonstrate all too clearly the consequences
of statelessness. Good government is not a luxury but a vital necessity, without which there can be no
development, economic or social.
—Anthony Chhibber, as cited in Wallis and Dollery (2001)
A
capable, efficient and effective state apparatus is necessary to maintain the political stabi-
lity, competitive markets, social policies, rule of law, and infrastructure investments
required for vibrant economic growth in the developing world. Contrary to popular opin-
ion, this is particularly the case under conditions of market liberalization and globalization. As
many authors have argued in recent years (for example, Haggard and Kaufman, 1995; Evans,
1995; Grindle, 1996; World Bank, 1997; Vellinga, 1998), it is a mistake to equate economic
success in the globalized world with a simple reduction in the size or the range of the state’s
activities. To the contrary, global production chains and rapid communications demand a qualita-
tive transformation and restructuring of the role of the state. Indeed, in recent years, most states
in the developing world have even been under pressure to increase their capacity. Witness, for
instance, the intense international pressure on otherwise market-friendly presidents like Mexico’s
Vicente Fox to increase government revenues through tax hikes.
Loans need to be paid back; basic services must be provided to the poorest citizens; workers
need to be helped in their transition to a more urban, industrialized, and market-based economy;
strategic investments in education and infrastructure have to be made; markets must be regulated;
and peace and stability need to be maintained. As Merilee Grindle (1996) has argued, in order to
carry out these and other tasks the state must strengthen its capacity in at least four different
areas (see Table 1). First, its institutional capacity must be assured through the imposition of
“authoritative and effective ‘rules of the game’ to regulate economic and political interactions.”
3
Table 1: FOUR DIMENSIONS OF STATE CAPACITY
Dimension Definition
Institutional Capacity Authoritative and effective “rules of the game” to regulate economic and political
interactions. Ability to assert the primacy of national policies, legal conventions,
and norms of social and political behavior over those of other groupings.
Technical Capacity The ability to set and manage effective macro-economic policies. A cadre of
well-trained economic analysts and managers. Well-staffed and appropriately
placed units for policy analysis. Important role for technical input and
information in decision making.
Administrative Capacity Effective administration of basic physical and social infrastructure. Ability to
perform basic administrative functions essential to economic development and
social welfare.
Political Capacity Effective and legitimate channels for societal demand making, representation,
and conflict resolution. Responsive political leaders and administrators. Societal
participation in decision-making.
Source: Adapted from Grindle 1996.
This means that the state ought to have the “ability to assert the primacy of national politics,
legal conventions, and norms of social and political behavior over those of other groupings.”
Second, the state’s technical capacity has to be consolidated. This implies “the ability to set and
manage effective macroeconomic policies,” which in turn requires “a cadre of well-trained eco-
nomic analysts and managers [and] well-staffed and appropriately placed units for policy analysis.”
Third, states need to strengthen their administrative capacity, which involves the “ability to per-
form basic administrative functions essential to economic development and social welfare.” Final-
ly, states in the developing world have to develop a full political capacity, which requires the con-
struction of “effective and legitimate channels for societal demand making, representation and
conflict resolution.”
The contemporary era of globalization and market liberalization by no means implies the end
of the state. The institutional, technical, administrative and political capacities of the state are now
as important as they have ever been. Good government continues to be an absolutely necessary
prerequisite for successful economic growth in the developing world.
Looking at the Latin American and Caribbean Region (LCR), there are three fundamental
threats to the construction of good societal participation in the region, namely corruption, clien-
telism, and capture. All three of these phenomena refer to the use of public office for private
gain, and their impact goes far beyond the simple diversion of funds. Corruption, in addition to
directly enriching individual bureaucrats, distorts markets and hampers service delivery (Rose-
Ackerman, 1999). Clientelism, in addition to unfairly channeling public resources to specific
client groups, alters the dynamics of political competition and leads to the ineffective provision
of public services (Fox, 1994). Capture, in addition to providing rents to specific economic
actors, also greatly alters markets and worsens the position of consumers, workers, and the envi-
ronment vis á vis corporations (Stigler, 1971). In the end, only by assuring the public interest
character of the state will good governance and the economic growth that accompanies it be
possible in LCR.
The poor are often hard hit by such “particularistic” uses of the state. This is because the
poor usually have few resources available to play such particularistic games. Societal participation
STATE-SOCIETY SYNERGY FOR ACCOUNTABILITY 5
is therefore necessary not only for economic growth in general, but also for combating poverty in
particular. As the case studies will further illustrate, the relationship between societal participation
and development effectiveness stems from numerous causal links, including:
1. Participatory planning processes promote decisionmaking based on needs identified by

potential beneficiaries, thus yielding a better targeting of resources;
2. Social accountability provides greater oversight of public resource management to discour-
age corruption, clientelism, and capture; and,
3. Participatory monitoring and evaluation gauges client opinion and satisfaction to advise in
the improvement of the quality of services.
One of the most effective ways to strengthen the four basic capacities of the state and to
combat corruption, clientelism and capture is through the construction of an honest, efficient
and effective (or, in other words, accountable) bureaucratic apparatus. This task should be at the
top of the agenda for almost all states in the developing world. How can this be done?
There are two general strategies for the achievement of this task. On the one hand, govern-
ments can strengthen the “command-and-control” elements of public administration. This involves
forcing bureaucrats into line “from above” by more rigorously enforcing performance targets and
by making them more vulnerable to punishment by superiors. On the other hand, governments
can open up their bureaucracies to pressure “from below.” This involves constructing a healthy
relationship between state and society so that social actors and individual citizens are empowered
to oblige the government to uphold the rule of law and fulfill its promises. This second strategy
constitutes one of the central thrusts of what has been called the “New Public Management”1 and
in general involves what McCubbins and Schwartz (1984) have called the “fire alarm” approach
as opposed to the “police patrol” approach to assuring the accountability of public servants.
Although the top-down approach is clearly important and necessary in many countries of the
developing world, especially given the chronic weakness of their bureaucratic apparatuses, the
focus of this paper is on the latter approach. Specifically, how can the relationship between state
and society be transformed from a process of particularistic demands, concessions, and manipula-
tions to a healthy engagement that produces a solid bureaucratic apparatus and policy outcomes
that are in the interest of the public as a whole? This is the central question that guides the dis-
cussion below.
Chapter 2 provides a general overview of the concept of accountability. It begins with a
review of some of the most important literature on this topic. Then it offers a categorization of
the different ways in which civil society can interact with the state in order to improve govern-
ment accountability.
Chapter 3 includes various case studies of successful examples of what is referred to as “state-
society synergy for accountability.” The emphasis is on successful cases because, as Judith Tendler
(1997) has pointed out, “the mainstream donor community’s advice about public-sector reform
arises from a literature that looked mainly at poor performance… This means that countries and
the experts that advise them have few models of good government that are grounded in these
countries’ own experiences.” Development professionals are acutely aware of the ways that gov-
ernments fail. There is a desperate need for sustained study of successful government innovations
in order to inspire and direct positive action. This study offers possible strategies for reflection
and discussion by World Bank staff. These case studies present just a sampling of the innovative
work currently being conducted in this sector. In addition, it should be noted that the evaluation
1. There is, of course, also a “top down” version of the New Public Management which involves the use
of strict performance contracts with each segment of government, as in New Zealand (Wallis and Dollery,
2001). Here I refer to the “bottom up” version of the New Public Management which is intimately linked
to the empowerment of civil society (Behn, 2001).
of the impact of the relationship between state and civil society on poverty reduction and the
public policy process remains a work in progress. Each of the cases presented offers mechanisms
that demonstrably increase civic engagement. Each anticipates an outcome of improved public
sector performance, but evaluations identifying precise determinants and relationships of causality
on these types of initiative are still few and far between.2 As the forms of social accountability are
varied, it is also possible that their impact is not uniform. Further review may find that “account-
ability” as active participation in the policy process has different consequences for policy quality
than does accountability as social monitoring and control. Participation as voice may also differ
from participation in the decision-making process itself. Nonetheless, several of the cases pre-
sented suggest positive results. Further investigation is required to provide additional evidence on
if and how increased civic involvement can improve public policy performance and poverty
reduction.
The case studies draw from a wide range of different contexts (Brazil, India, Mexico, U.S.)
and from a variety of different areas of government activity (corruption control, environmental
regulation, poverty reduction, election monitoring, infrastructure provision, school reform,
police reform). The diversity of cases is important for two reasons. First, it allows the reader to
gain a full perspective on the many different ways in which states and societies can work together
to solidify accountability. Second, it lends scientific weight to the conclusions. When the same
fundamental issues come up repeatedly throughout a wide diversity of cases, it is much more
likely that the issues are fundamental to the phenomenon itself, and not due to specific contextual
factors.
There are, of course, some inherent limitations to research based on case studies. For
instance, small data sets prohibit the use of the most sophisticated statistical methods. In addi-
tion, there is always the possibility that the cases selected are unique, thereby limiting the applica-
tion of the lessons learned from them. The conclusions that arise from case studies should subse-
quently be put to the test using quantitative methods.
Nevertheless, the case study method also has many unique benefits. The close exploration of
particular cases is the only way to discover the specific mechanisms that lead to success or failure.
In addition, only by understanding the details of implementation can the researcher see whether
and how the discourse of participation actually leads to the implementation of participatory
schema on the ground. Studies based on large data sets necessarily sacrifice much of the useful
detail embedded in case studies.
Following the case studies, in Chapter 4 some overall lessons for World Bank staff that arise
out of this paper are outlined. This chapter offers both conceptual and practical lessons on how
best to initiate, design, and implement successful pro-accountability structures grounded in state-
society synergy. Finally, the paper concludes with a brief overview of the central points of the
paper and some suggestions with regard to directions for future research.
2. Both the Latin America and Caribbean Region (LCR) and the Poverty Reduction and Economic
Management (PREM) anchor of the World Bank are at present engaged in a quantitative evaluation exercise
precisely to provide this type of additional insight on the impact of empowerment type initiatives on devel-
opment effectiveness and other outcomes.
CHAPTER 2
ACCOUNTABILITY AND
CIVIL SOCIETY
In both the North and South, shortcomings in conventional accountability systems—secrecy in auditing,
ineffective policy reviews in legislatures, the electorate’s difficulty in sending strong signals to decision
makers between elections, excessive delays in courts and inadequate sanctions for failure to apply
administrative rules or respect standards—have created pressures for better channels for vertical infor-
mation flows and stronger accountability relationships between state agents and citizens
—Goetz and Jenkins (2001)
G
ood government does not emerge spontaneously or naturally out of the good hearts of
individual bureaucrats and politicians. It is the result of a tough, and often conflict-ridden,
process of institutional design. The principle element that assures good government is the
accountability of public officials. This involves both answerability, or “the obligation of public
officials to inform about and to explain what they are doing” and enforcement, or “the capacity of
accounting agencies to impose sanctions on powerholders who have violated their public
duties”(Schedler, 1999a). Although some individual officials may never need institutional struc-
tures to assure their commitment to the public good, most do need it at least some of the time.
The only way to guarantee good government is by institutionalizing a powerful accountability
structure that holds every public official responsible for his/her actions as a public servant.
Although the term accountability is often used as if it referred only to the prevention of ille-
gal or corrupt activity by public officials, it should also include the design and implementation of
government programs within the general understanding of basic “public duties” for which public
servants are responsible. For instance, according to Samuel Paul (1992) “accountability means
holding individuals and organizations responsible for performance measured as objectively as
possible.” This means that in addition to the honest handling of public funds, bureaucrats should
also be responsible both for the fulfillment of predetermined policy goals and for the responsive-
ness of policies to the specific needs of the public, and particularly to the needs of those who
most depend on government services: the poor. Therefore, in addition to answerability and
7
enforcement, should perhaps add receptiveness, or the capacity of officials to take into account the
knowledge and opinions of citizens, as a third central element of accountability.
Categories of Accountability
Robert Behn (2001) follows in this line of thought by defining three broad categories of
accountability. First, there is accountability for finances that “focuses on financial accounting—on
how the books are kept and how the money is spent.” Second, there is accountability for fairness
where “to ensure that government and its officials pay careful attention to ethical standards…we
create rules to codify exactly what we mean, operationally, by fairness and equity. These rules
create processes and procedures that, if followed, ensure that government has been equitable-that
it has treated its citizens fairly.” Third, like Paul, there is accountability for performance that goes
beyond prudent spending and fair treatment to involve the successful accomplishment of public
purposes. Behn explains that while “accountability for finances and accountability for fairness
reflect concerns for how government does what it does…we also care what government does—
what it actually accomplishes.” For the author, the central question in this third category of
accountability is “are the policies, programs, and activities of government producing the results
that they were designed to produce?”
For the sake of clarity and simplicity, in this paper a more simple two-sided dividing line will
be applied between legal accountability and performance accountability. “Legal accountability”
involves keeping public officials in check by making sure that they respect the legal order both in
their administrative tasks and in their relationship to society at large. “Performance accountability”
involves the successful implementation of policies designed to benefit the public in general, with a
particular emphasis on policies that attend to the needs of the poor. The first type of accountabili-
ty has to do with respect for the rule of law and preventing the abuse of public office. The sec-
ond type of accountability involves questions of efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness.
Mechanisms of Accountability
What then are the most powerful and effective accountability mechanisms that help discipline and
direct the actions of public officials? Free and fair elections are one of the most common and
effective of such mechanisms. Through periodic elections, top government officials are forced to
take into account the mandate of the electorate (receptiveness), inform the public about what they
have done while in office (answerability), and then be judged by the people (enforcement). Under
this arrangement, political leaders who work for the common good are supposed to be reelected,
and leaders who use public office for particularistic ends are supposed to be removed from office.
Proof of the effectiveness of this mechanism is the fact that the recent arrival of electoral
democracy in most of LCR has indeed improved the accountability of public officials, leading to
important advances in good government. Nevertheless, there are also unfortunately many exam-
ples of worsening accountability situations in Latin America’s fledgling democracies. Indeed, as
Guillermo O’Donnell (1994) has written, many of the new democracies in LCR are best under-
stood as “delegative democracies” whose actions are in essence unaccountable to anyone except
for the president himself.
There are both structural and contextual explanations for this failure of formal electoral
democracy to bring about good governance in LCR. There are at least three different structural
problems with elections as accountability mechanisms in general. First, and most obviously, elec-
tions only hold elected officials accountable. The vast majority of public officials are appointed
bureaucrats who are not directly accountable to the public through the electoral process.
Although elected politicians have strong incentives to keep bureaucrats in line in order to protect
their own reputations, the ease with which blame can be shifted to the bureaucrat himself/herself
or to other elected officials greatly dilutes the indirect accountability effect of elections on
bureaucrats. Second, because elections only occur once every few years and force an incredible
diversity of opinions and evaluations together into a single ballot, it is virtually impossible for
elections to give clear accountability signals to individual office holders (Manin, Przeworski and
Stokes, 1999). Indeed, as authors like James Fearon (1999) have argued, citizens themselves
often consider their vote to be more about “picking the best person for the job” than about sanc-
tioning or holding accountable past office holders. In this case, the accountability signal is diluted
even further. Third, even if the accountability signal were somehow clearly discernible, the fact
that most politicians are elected by only a small portion of the population often forces politicians
to favor patronage, or corruption, over initiatives that would bring long-term benefit to the public
as a whole (Varshney, 1999).
If the weaknesses of existing democratic institutions in the LCR are added to these more
general structural problems with elections, the situation gets even worse. The gap between politi-
cal and civil society, the clientelistic nature of many political parties, the excess private funding for
candidates, and the lack of public information about the general workings of government and
even less information about the specific behavior of individual office holders in the LCR weakens
even further the effectiveness of elections as mechanisms of sanction and control in the region. In
short, for both structural and contextual reasons, free and fair elections are simply not enough to
guarantee good government in the LCR.
Consequently, vertical accountability mechanisms, like elections, that require government offi-
cials to appeal “downwards” to the people at large need to be complemented by horizontal
accountability mechanisms that require public officials and agencies to report “sideways” to other
officials and agencies within the state itself. As O’Donnell (1999) has written, “horizontal account-
ability” is “the existence of state agencies that are legally enabled and empowered, and factually
willing and able, to take actions that span from routine oversight to criminal sanctions or impeach-
ment in relation to actions or omissions by other agents or agencies of the state that may be quali-
fied as unlawful.” Examples of horizontal accountability mechanisms include institutions like
human rights ombudsman, independent electoral institutes, corruption control agencies, legislative
investigative commissions and administrative courts. All of these are public institutions that are
specifically designed to evaluate, control and direct the behavior of other government officials.
Nevertheless, as with elections, the record of such agents of horizontal accountability has
been quite irregular throughout the LCR. Although some institutions like Brazil’s Public Prose-
cutor, Peru’s Ombudsman and Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) stand out as examples
of innovative successes in horizontal accountability mechanisms (Sadek and Batista Cavalcanti,
2000; Santistevan, 2000; Woldenberg, 2002), most other institutions have been much less suc-
cessful in carrying out their tasks. Once again we are faced with the puzzle of uneven develop-
ment of political institutions in the region. What accounts for the wide variations in both vertical
and horizontal accountability enforcement between different countries in the LCR and between
different institutions within the same country?
The Participation of Civil Society

This paper highlights the importance of one crucial explanatory factor: the direct involvement of
civil society.3 The participation of community groups, NGOs and citizens in general is one of the
most important factors that explains successful accountability arrangements.
The participation of civil society can reinforce structures of accountability in three different
ways. First, direct monitoring and pressure from civil society actors as well as popular votes on
particular issues or policies can complement elections as additional elements of vertical accountabil-
ity. This increases the frequency and the clarity of the accountability signals that citizens send to
public officials and thereby improves their vertical accountability towards the public. Examples of
such participation include everything from surveys that monitor the effectiveness of public services,
to media exposés of bureaucratic wrongdoing, to the organization of plebiscites and referendums.
3. The term “civil society” refers to both organized and unorganized citizens acting independently from
government, political parties and the profit motive in order to transform society and governance. This
includes religious and professional organizations, labor unions, grassroots organizations, and NGOs, but also
reaches beyond these groups to include the participation of citizens outside of formal organizations.
For the purposes of this paper, this form of civil society participation is called direct vertical
accountability in order to distinguish it from electoral vertical accountability, which is grounded in
the formal, periodic election of members of the three branches of government.
Second, in addition to the direct effects of external pressure “from below,” the action of civil
society can strengthen the effectiveness of existing horizontal accountability mechanisms within
the state itself. As Jonathan Fox (2000) has written,
civil society demands for state accountability matter most when they empower the state’s own
checks and balances. By exposing abuses of power, raising standards and public expectations of
state performance, and bringing political pressure to bear, they can encourage oversight institutions
to act, as well as to target and weaken entrenched opponents to accountability.
Here the idea is not the direct action against public wrongdoing by society as with vertical
accountability, but the more indirect mechanism of pressuring existing agencies to do their jobs
effectively. For example, in their analysis of the social response to two extra-judicial killings in
Argentina, Catalina Smulovitz and Enrique Peruzzotti (2000a, 2000b) documented how the
combination of mobilization, legal action and media exposure can effectively guarantee that the
judicial system operates impartially, even when the perpetrators are well connected or even part of
the government apparatus itself. Another example of this type of civil society participation would
be the human rights ombudsmen, a clearly “horizontal” institution whose actions are consistently
strengthened and often directed by social demands. This form of participation is referred to as
society-driven horizontal accountability.
Third, in addition to pressuring from the outside and reinforcing existing control mecha-
nisms within the state, civil society actors can participate directly in the government’s own institu-
tions of horizontal accountability. Such participation breaks down the division between vertical
and horizontal accountability mechanisms, since it involves the participation of “vertical” actors
in “horizontal” mechanisms. It is therefore a “hybrid form of accountability” that might best be
called “diagonal accountability” (Goetz and Jenkins, 2001). For Anne Marie Goetz and Rob
Jenkins, this form of civil society participation is special because it “represents a shift towards
augmenting the limited effectiveness of civil society’s watchdog function by breaking the state’s
monopoly over the responsibility for official executive oversight.” Examples of this form of partic-
ipation would include citizen advisory boards that fulfill public functions like auditing govern-
ment expenditures, supervising procurement, or monitoring elections. Following Goetz and
Jenkins, this form of participation is referred to as diagonal accountability.
Both state and society actors usually play crucial roles in bringing about these three forms of
accountability. “Direct vertical” mechanisms like plebiscites and referendums require both the
support of the legislature and a vibrant civil society that is willing to get out the vote. “Society-
driven horizontal” mechanisms like human rights ombudsmen require both social pressure and
enlightened bureaucratic action. “Diagonal” mechanisms also depend on the willingness of a
government willing to open up its accounts to independent actors as well as the will of civil society
participants to take the time to look over and evaluate these accounts.
This is not to say that “state-society synergy” (Evans, 1996a, 1996b) always takes place.
States often unilaterally organize the participation of civil society, and societies frequently unilat-
erally press their demands on government. Yet, the most productive results arise when both sides
actively participate in opening spaces for civil society participation. Unilateral state action often
ends in manipulation or “reverse vertical accountability” (Fox, 2000) in which citizens end up
being accountable to government officials for their actions. At the same time unilateral social
action often results in repression and violence by the state.
The effectiveness of “state-society synergy” is by no means dependent on the existence of
consensus, value sharing or even trust between state and civil society actors. Indeed, conflict and
suspicion generate greater oversight, which often yield greater success in producing state-society
synergies. As Catalina Smulovitz (2000) has pointed out, it is often the case that “the social trust
FIGURE 1: ACCOUNTABILITY AND CIVIL SOCIETY
PUBLIC
OFFICIAL/AGENCY
HORIZONTAL
AGENCY OF ACCOUNTABILITY RULE OF
ACCOUNTABILITY LAW
DIAGONAL
ACCOUNTABILITY
ELECTORAL
SOCIETY-DRIVEN
VERTICAL
HORIZONTAL
ACCOUNTABILITY
ACCOUNTABILITY
DIRECT VERTICAL
ACCOUNTABILITY
CIVIL
ELECTORATE
SOCIETY
that results from value-sharing weakens citizens’ oversight and control capacities of what rulers
do, and increases, in turn, the chances of opportunistic actions by one of them.” It is important
not to fall prey to depoliticized or neutral ideas of civil society that see “cooperative” or “moder-
ate” forms of social organization as the only ones that can positively influence the construction of
accountability arrangements. Smulovitz has made this point very clear. “I am not arguing, as
some have [for example, Almond and Verba, 1963; Weingast, 1997], that an autonomous civil
society is important because citizens share values that sustain the benefits of self-restraint. I am
arguing that an autonomous civil society is important because it implies the existence of multiple
external eyes with interests in the enforcement of law and denunciation of non-obedience.”
From the above discussion, the following diagram can be derived, (Figure 1) summarizing
the theoretical framework:
CHAPTER 3
CASE STUDIES
T
his chapter examines several relatively successful attempts to construct “state-society syner-
gy for accountability.” Each case study identifies the different forms that civil society par-
ticipation takes (direct vertical, society-driven horizontal, and diagonal) as well as the types
of accountability (legal and performance accountability) that are strengthened. Particular empha-
sis is placed on issues of institutional design to derive concrete lessons for reformers on what does
and does not work. In addition, each case study explores the origins of the particular accountabil-
ity arrangement/institutional design. Effective accountability mechanisms never simply arise out
of enlightened thinking by individual politicians, but always also emerge out of complex social
processes of conflict and negotiation.
The cases are organized according to the level at which state actors have explicitly encour-
aged the participation of civil society in the structuring of accountability arrangements. The first
case presents the example of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, where the local govern-
ment has made an effort to include social actors fully in the process of policy design and monitor-
ing. Then the case of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) in Mexico is discussed, where the fed-
eral government has successfully balanced the construction of a highly professional, powerful and
autonomous government agency with the full involvement of societal actors in program direction,
operation and monitoring. Following this, the case of police and school reform in Chicago is
explained, where the government also actively encouraged direct citizen participation in govern-
ment, but refrained from directly stimulating civil society organization and from giving legal sta-
tus to some important elements of the participatory scheme.
The fourth case study discusses decentralization and rural development in Mexico. Here the
opening up of the state is less wholehearted than the previous three cases. Nevertheless, an
alliance between reformist public officials and strong civil-society organizations managed to con-
struct participatory accountability relationships despite the resistance of other sectors. Fifth, the
case of the Toxics Release Inventory in the United States is presented, where the government
almost accidentally ended up playing the role of external prompter, as opposed to direct organizer
13
and stimulator, of civil society participation for accountability. Sixth, the less successful case of
women’s police stations in Brazil is discussed, where, after an initial stage of state-society synergy,
the state ended up overly bureaucratizing and mainstreaming the original proposal. Finally, a pair
of cases of “social auditing” from India demonstrate that state-society synergy is possible even
under conditions of a recalcitrant state in a particularly difficult and “secret” area of government
activity. These Indian cases show that although a progressive government or a significant group of
“reformists” within government definitely helps the accountability process, constructive accounta-
bility relationships between state and society also can arise out of social mobilization alone.
Case #1: Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil

The Porto Alegre city government represents one of the most effective strategies for state-society
collaboration for accountability in the developing world. Since 1989, when the Worker’s Party
(PT) first won the city government, Porto Alegre has placed spending decisions for over ten per-
cent of its annual budget in the hands of the people. Every year, more than 14,000 citizens in
this city of 1.3 million participate in neighborhood meetings as well as 16 regional and 5 thematic
assemblies to establish priorities for government investment in infrastructure and basic social
services. Each assembly elects two council members to serve on a citywide Council of Participatory
Budgeting (COP), the organ responsible for putting together the final citywide budget plan. At
each level of the process (neighborhood, district, citywide) decisions are made through intense
negotiation and the use of sophisticated weighted voting systems designed to assure a fair distri-
bution of resources, with an emphasis on helping the most needy areas of the city. At the end of
the process, the proposed budget is then submitted to the local legislature for final approval and
promulgation. During the following year, the regional and thematic assemblies, council members
and neighborhood groups evaluate the previous year’s negotiation process and monitor the
implementation process of the previous year’s budget.
In Porto Alegre (and many other cities governed by the PT in Brazil since 1989, like Belo
Horizonte and Betim [Nylen, 2002]) the PT has created an alternative mechanism of accountabili-
ty through direct and constant citizen participation in the fundamental tasks of governing. The
participatory process is responsible for establishing agreements between citizens and representing
the interests of the people at large with respect to specific spending and implementation decisions.
Diagonal Accountability in Action

The participatory budgeting process provides an excellent example of diagonal accountability.
Ordinary citizens are involved directly in the planning and supervision of public spending, activi-
ties normally under the exclusive purview of public officials. This arrangement is clearly a step
beyond both the traditional watchdog or society-driven horizontal role of civil society as well as
protest or referendum based direct vertical roles for social actors. Instead of trying to influence
policy from the outside, the citizens of Porto Alegre are invited inside the governmental apparatus
itself, thus confusing the neat horizontal-vertical framework for understanding accountability
mechanisms.
This arrangement has had a clear impact both on questions of legal accountability and per-
formance accountability in Porto Alegre. First, because it institutionalizes the existence of “multi-
ple external eyes” (Smulovitz, 2000), it has drastically reduced the possibilities and incentives for
corrupt behavior on behalf of bureaucrats, thereby strengthening legal accountability. Each neigh-
borhood and region is clearly informed as to the exact amount of funds that will be invested in
which products and services in its area. Even more importantly, because the citizens themselves
participate in designing the budget, they feel that they have a personal stake in making sure the
government complies with it. As Zander Navarro (1998) has written,
by introducing an unprecedented transparency in the formation, allocation and implementation of

the municipal budget, “opening” it to the general scrutiny by the citizenry, the [PT government in
Porto Alegre has] dramatically reduced the room for petty and backstage arrangements linking civil
servants to private interests. Not to mention major illegal and/or ethically illicit proposals, ren-
dered impossible when all acts and intentions are so loudly publicized.
Second, the budgeting process improves performance accountability by reducing clientelism

by opening alternative channels for the participation of civil society. The crucial element is the
entirely open and public nature of the budget assemblies. Any adult can attend, speak and vote in
the assemblies.
The success of the participatory budgeting (PB) as a participatory policy is connected to the fact
that it offers an alternative to the so-called tradition of political mediators [or “clientelism”], a tra-
dition in which politicians distribute material goods as a favor. The relevant phenomenon, in the
case of the PB, is the capacity it has of transferring from the political mediators to the population
the decision of the distribution of material goods through the creation of a set of public elements:
assemblies, lists of the previous access to goods, necessity criteria. (Avritzer, 2000)
Under a clientelist scheme, if and when citizens become dissatisfied with the way particular
organizations are representing them in the assemblies, it is extremely easy to form a new group
and thereby gain access to special organizational representation in the popular votes. This leads to
easy “exit” options for members of clientelistic groups where “voice” is not an effective form of
protest.
Third, performance accountability also is improved by limiting the capture of state institu-
tions by wealthy interests. Popular participation helps replace the power of money with the power
of voice. The special design of Porto Alegre’s system reinforces this tendency even further. The
algorithm used for determining budget priorities intentionally tilts investments towards poorer
neighborhoods. Due to this built in pro-poor bias, the same need presented by two neighbor-
hoods is much more likely to be implemented in the poorer one than the wealthier one. As a
result,
of the hundreds of projects approved, investment in the poorer residential districts of the city has
exceeded investment in wealthier areas … Each year, the majority of the 20 to 25 kilometers of new
pavement has gone to the city’s poorer peripheries. Today, 98 percent of all residencies in the city have
running water, up from 75 percent in 1988; sewage coverage has risen to 98 percent from 46 percent;
in the years between 1992-95, the housing department (DEMHAB) offered housing assistance to
28,862 families, against 1,714 for the comparable period of 1986-1988; and the number of func-
tioning public municipal schools today is 86, against 29 in 1988. (Baiocchi, 2001)
Origins of the Participatory Budgeting Process

The origins of this successful pro-accountability arrangement can be found in both society and the
state. There are three different means by which social actors and practices shaped the PB process.
First, the idea of instituting a participatory budget had its origins within civil society. It was the
Union of Residents’ Associations of Porto Alegre (UAMPA) that first advocated the introduction
of such a mechanism in 1986 (Avritzer, 2000). Second, an independently dynamic civil society has
been willing to occupy the spaces that have been opened “from above” by the city government.
Avritzer establishes that the expression “participatory budget” did not exist in the PT’s electoral
platform for city government in 1988. It only spoke of developing “popular councils.” The design
of today’s PB arrangement only arose after a period of intense negotiation and participation both
within the new government and between the new government, civil society groups, and involved
citizens. Third, the particular institutional form developed by the Porto Alegre government was
largely modeled on already existing practices of deliberation and negotiation. “It is also due to the
adaptation of the institutional form of participation to the pre-existing praxes between community
players that the participation of these players is so big. In other words, from the institutional point
of view it seems to be of fundamental importance that the proposals for public participation oper-
ate according to pre-existing praxes” (Avritzer, 2000).
State actors have also played an important role in originating and maintaining the PB process.
The simultaneity of PB in Porto Alegre with the rise of the PT to power is not a coincidence.
The PB has been a central element in the PT’s broader project to use state power to bring about
a long-term transformation in the social bases of power and authority. In addition, the particular
institutional design chosen by the state reformers went far beyond incorporating previously exist-
ing organized civil society to actively promote the development of new social actors. As Abers
(1998) has written, “Porto Alegre provides us with an unusual example in which state reformers
took on a more proactive role, not only providing an enabling environment, in which the forma-
tion of civic groups was explicitly promoted, but also working directly with local communities to
help them organize.”
Lessons Learned
This case provides many lessons for future pro-accountability state reformers. First, poor, uneducat-
ed people can and do effectively participate in the activities of governance. Baiocchi (2001) docu-
ments that 60 percent of the participants in the PB process in Porto Alegre have no high school
education and 30 percent earn less than two times the minimum wage (US$62 per month, Nov.
1999), an income that leaves them below the poverty line. Avritzer’s (2000) survey shows that 46
percent of the participants have not completed elementary school. Abers (1998) reveals that while
in 1991 29 percent of Porto Alegre’s residents earned three times the minimum wage or less, 45
percent of the budget participants fit this profile. This last statistic is particularly interesting
because it shows that the underprivileged not only actively participate but that they even partici-
pate more, relative to their size in the population, than better off groups. In short, there is no rea-
son to hesitate to design participative accountability mechanisms in poor, or even destitute,
regions.
This brings us to the second lesson. It appears that governments can only get back as much
as they put in to efforts to activate civil society participation for accountability. Authentic opening
and active involvement are crucial for success. In Porto Alegre, citizens are taken out of their
usual role as only “advisors” or information providers to government projects and thrust directly
into the decision making process itself. Public opinion surveys and open forums for the expres-
sion of opinions are clearly useful, but they do not create the active engagement and sense of
responsibility as do truly participatory processes like the PB process in Porto Alegre.
In addition, there is an important difference between simply opening spaces for the participa-
tion of previously organized groups and communities and getting actively involved in stimulating
the participation of citizens in general. A central element of the Porto Alegre experience is that it
makes participation open to the entire population and, even more importantly, actively encourages
the participation of unorganized citizens through the use of government employed community
organizers. Without such involvement, “participation” schemes can easily end up only strengthen-
ing previously existing clientelistic networks and unequal intra-community power relations.
Third, governments need to take civil society into account in the design of the participative
mechanisms themselves. This is an absolutely crucial point that is all too frequently ignored. Porto
Alegre is special not only because citizens have an unprecedented level of involvement in the PB
process itself, but also because they were directly involved in the design of the process itself. The
PB did not simply arise out of the minds of enlightened bureaucrats. It originated in civil society,
was pushed forward by social actors and was ultimately modeled on previously existing practices
in civil society by a new government that itself consisted mostly of individuals who had made
their careers as community and social activists. Participatory mechanisms usually sustain the mark
of their birth. The best way to achieve full participation as an end point is to start off with it at
the beginning.
Fourth, it is important to increase the benefits and to reduce the costs of participation. On
the one hand, one of the crucial elements of success of PB in Porto Alegre is that the expansion
of participation coincided with a substantial increase in tax revenues4 that enhanced the govern-
ment’s capacity to fulfill community demands. Participation became obviously worthwhile
because it brought real benefits to the communities involved. On the other hand, the govern-
ment also made great efforts to reduce the costs of participation. The government sent officials to
the neighborhood and district meetings instead of requiring residents to travel to city hall. In
addition, community organizers were sent out into the communities and District Administrative
Centers were set up.
This brings us to our fifth and final point that has to do with the issue of decentralization.
According to Fung and Olin Wright (2001), the Porto Alegre experience is an excellent example
of how a healthy balance can be struck between “devolution” and “centralized supervision and
coordination”. Although devolution and decentralization are important because they bring gov-
ernment closer to the people, if carried out blindly, they tend to reinforce inequalities both within
the newly “autonomous” local units as well as between them. Local power holders are allowed to
run free, and underprivileged localities are abandoned to their own devices. Decentralization is
only productive if the center remains responsible for the supervision and coordination of activities
in the local units. This tension is creatively and effectively resolved in the case of Porto Alegre by
the involvement of the central city government at all levels of participation and the careful process
of participatory preference aggregation and negotiation that exists all the way from the neighbor-
hoods to the citywide level.
Case #2: Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute

Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) stands out as one of the most successful efforts in the
LCR to construct an autonomous agency for public accountability. It sets an important precedent
in a region where most such agencies, from independent corruption bureaus to human rights
commissions and public prosecutors, tend to be heavily politicized, ineffective and lack the neces-
sary autonomy.5 Mexico’s IFE is particularly successful because, like the participatory budgeting
process in Porto Alegre, it breaks with the traditional division between horizontal and vertical
accountability and institutionalizes the diagonal participation of civil society.
Combating Corruption, Clientelism and Capture

Electoral administration involves essentially the same problems of corruption, clientelism and
capture as does the government provision of any basic good or service like public security, educa-
tion, health care or infrastructure. For most of the 20th century the electoral process in Mexico
has been riddled with corrupt practices. Public funds (particularly funds for “social
development”) have been systematically diverted to finance the activities of the dominant Party of
the Institutional Revolution (PRI). These funds were subsequently used both to win elections
and to maintain a solid clientelistic network throughout the country. Such misuse of public funds
led to a situation in which public monies were distributed almost exclusively based on political
alliances and without consideration of need or development potential, a situation that has had a
profoundly negative effect on economic growth. This occurred because the agencies in charge of
running elections and monitoring the activities of political parties had become almost entirely
captured by the interests of the dominant party itself.
4. “If 1988 is made equal to 100, in real terms the total participation of all municipal taxes increased to
307 and housing and land taxation alone increased to 285 in 1996” (Navarro, 1998). This increase in tax
collection is at least partly due to the increased trust in the effectiveness of government that the PB process
itself brought about.
5. The United States is no exception to this rule. The U.S. Federal Electoral Commission, for instance, is
notorious for its ineffectiveness and inefficiency as well as for its profound level of politicization (see
Laforge, 1996; Jackson, 1990).
These problems have been aggressively confronted in recent years with the construction of an
autonomous electoral institute. The IFE’s principal activities include organizing federal elections,
distributing public funds to the political parties, monitoring the use of both public and private
funds by the parties, checking for media bias in the coverage of political campaigns, putting
together and cleaning up the official electoral roll, and running public education campaigns (IFE,
2000a). What makes the IFE special is the way in which its core administrative structure of 2,500
civil servants is simultaneously accountable to and holds accountable an extensive web of govern-
ment and societal actors above, below, within, and on both sides of it. The IFE institutionalizes
multiple external eyes in a broad diversity of forms by allowing society to monitor government,
government to monitor society, government to monitor government, and society to monitor
society. Its accountability structure includes five distinct elements.
First, societal actors are directly involved in the direction and monitoring of the Institute’s
activities. Within the IFE there is an independent, “citizen-run” General Council that serves as
both a special horizontal accountability agency for electoral affairs and as the IFE’s principal
directive body. The General Council is a permanent body made up of nine members who are
responsible for monitoring the operations of the administrative staff of the IFE, resolving disputes
concerning the interpretation and application of the Federal Electoral Code (COFIPE), and giv-
ing vision and direction to the institute as a whole. The Council is made up of council members
who are each appointed by two-thirds of the lower house of Congress to serve seven-year terms.
The two-thirds rule is significant because no councilor can be elected unless he or she is backed
by a multiparty consensus. This excludes council members who are closely affiliated with a single
party and assures the professional “citizen” nature of the Council.
The General Council also seeks to maintain a close link to society. First of all, the meetings of
the General Council are public. Although the population at large cannot attend or directly partic-
ipate in the meetings, the minutes and decisions are widely publicized, reported on by the media,
and are available via the Internet. This is very different from the modus operandi of most govern-
ment agencies both inside and outside of the LCR and permits civil society to fulfill the crucial
task of second order monitoring by overseeing the monitoring activities of their representatives
on the General Council. In addition, one representative from each registered political party and
one Legislative Councilor from each political party that has representation in Congress sits on the
General Council. These party representatives can fully participate in the discussions of the General
Council and have access to all of the same information as the council members but do not have
the power to vote on initiatives or decisions. It is said that they have the power of voice but not
of the vote. The presence of all of the political parties assures the non-partisan behavior of the
council members and means that any misstep by the IFE will be immediately publicized. Mean-
while, the politicians’ lack of full authority guarantees the citizen nature of the council and legiti-
mates its claim to be above the interests of individual political parties. In general, all of the above
elements of institutional design are intended to guarantee that the General Council represents the
interests of society as a whole against the dominant “partyocracy” (Cárdenas Gracia, 2000).
Second, in addition to empowering societal actors in the direction and monitoring of the
activities of the institute, the IFE’s accountability structure also places it under the monitoring eye
of the three branches of government. All of the decisions of the General Council can be appealed
to and reversed by a special Federal Electoral Tribunal (TRIFE) within the judicial branch. Also,
the IFE’s budget must be included as a part of the President’s budget initiative and approved by
Congress every year. In addition, all of the activities of the IFE are monitored by the executive
branch through the Secretary of Finance and the Secretary of the Comptroller and Administrative
Reform (SECODAM) and by the legislature through the Superior Federal Auditor (ASF).
Third, the IFE has been a leader in civil service reform. In Mexico, the Foreign Service,
teachers in the public school system, the Office of the Attorney for Agricultural Affairs, the
National Statistics, Geography, and Information Institute (INEGI), the Judiciary, and the Tax
Administrative System have all implemented civil service reforms. Nevertheless, as David Arellano
and Juan Pablo Guerrero (2000) have pointed out, “the most systematic, open and meritocratic
system is undoubtedly that created in the independent agency that organizes elections, the IFE.”
The IFE has had a strong Civil Service Statute in place since 1992, but the new 1999 statute
definitively places the IFE at the vanguard of civil service reform in Mexico. The new statute
clearly codifies each one of the five central elements of the civil service: hiring, training, evalua-
tion, promotion, and sanctions (IFE, 2003). In addition, one of the IFE’s six Executive Direc-
torates is exclusively dedicated to applying the civil service code. Finally, in order to prevent cor-
ruption the council members are paid a very high salary. The law mandates that the council
members receive the same remuneration as Supreme Court judges (over $100,000 USD a year).
Fourth, during its most important moment of service delivery, the organization of the federal
elections, the IFE puts in place a structure of multiple surveillance by recruiting a huge army of
citizen volunteers. During the months leading up to the 2000 elections the IFE trained over
800,000 volunteer citizens to run 113,423 polling sites (Woldenberg, 2001). Each polling site
consists of seven members: a president, a secretary, two counters, and three general substitutes.
These members are unpaid and are selected by a double lottery from the full electoral roll, in
order to assure impartiality (IFE, 2000a). All of the participants receive two training courses that
are designed and implemented by the IFE. In addition, the IFE trains both national and interna-
tional observers in the basics of electoral law so that they can serve as additional eyes at the vot-
ing booths. Finally, each political party is permitted to send one representative to each voting
booth on election day. Each one of the citizens present at a voting booth can file complaints con-
cerning how the voting process was organized and how the votes were counted (IFE, 2000a). In
total, between 10 and 15 citizens participate at each voting booth in the monitoring of the elec-
toral process, meaning that in the year 2000 more than one million citizens were mobilized in
order to assure the realization of free and fair elections.
Fifth, in addition to (a) empowering societal actors in its leadership, its internal monitoring
and its operations, (b) holding itself accountable to the three branches of government, and (c)
institutionalizing accountability within its internal structure, the IFE also (d) carries out impor-
tant horizontal accountability activities towards external actors. The IFE distributes and supervis-
es the use of large quantities of funds by the political parties (US$377 million in the year 2000
alone; Woldenberg, 2001) as well as monitors the source, size and use of private donations (each
party is allowed to collect individually up to 5 percent of the total public funding given to all of
the parties). Every year each political party is required to report all of its private donations and all
of its expenses to the General Council. The General Council is authorized to review this informa-
tion, apply sanctions for the misuse of funds and audit the accounts of the political parties. Each
year the IFE issues penalties for hundreds of thousands of pesos to the political parties (Lujambio,
2002).
In addition, the IFE is also responsible for monitoring media coverage of election campaigns
as well as the sale of political propaganda in the media. During the months leading up to the
federal election, the IFE publishes reports evaluating bias in media coverage. It also assures that
the prices charged for political advertising are not superior to those charged for commercial
advertising and that each political party is offered the same price for equivalent time spots and has
the same opportunity to occupy the most competitive spots (IFE, 2000a).
Overall, the IFE has been remarkably successful. In a short ten years of life, it has successfully
consolidated its internal structure, earned respect and recognition from all major political actors,
gained widespread popular legitimacy, and perfected its operational effectiveness. It is the IFE that
guaranteed the fairness of the groundbreaking 1997 and 2000 federal elections that finally inaugu-
rated a new era towards a more democratic Mexico. The lack of significant post-electoral protests
and mobilizations in the year 2000 was unprecedented for a presidential election in Mexico and
attests to the success of the IFE in terms of both legal accountability and performance accountability.
The Mexican political system has always been unique in the LCR for its highly institutionalized
form of governance. Today, instead of standing out for its institutionalized authoritarianism,
Mexico distinguishes itself through its successful institutionalization of democratic accountability

through the construction of the IFE.
Background
For decades, electoral reform was one of the most important ways in which the authoritarian
state-party regime of the PRI was able to accommodate opposition while simultaneously main-
taining its control over the central levers of power. Since the founding of the PRI’s precursor, the
Party of the National Revolution (PNR) in 1929, the electoral laws have been modified 22 times
(Molinar Horcasitas, 1996). At times, reforms have been made in order to stimulate the partici-
pation of small, loyal opposition parties, as when proportional representation was introduced in
the 1962-1963 reform and then expanded during subsequent reforms. Other times reforms have
been designed in order to assure the dominance of the PRI in the face of important threats to its
hegemony.6
The constitutional amendment that created the IFE in 1990 followed in this tradition of a
double-edged electoral reform. In response to the crisis of political legitimacy that arose out of
the fraud surrounding the 1988 presidential elections7 and the massive social mobilization
demanding democratization that followed, the state-party regime had to demonstrate to both
national and international civil society its seriousness about combating electoral fraud. Neverthe-
less, it was simultaneously interested in maintaining its power over the electoral process. As a
result, the 1990 reform did not grant the IFE significant autonomy from the executive branch or
the ruling party. The Secretary of Government (Secretario de Gobernación) was named the presi-
dent of the institute, and the voting members included a disproportionate representation of
council members whose appointments were closely controlled by or directly represented the PRI
and the government (Molinar Horcasitas, 1996).
In 1994, the political crisis created by the Zapatista uprising, the mass mobilization against
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and for democracy, and the assassination
of the PRI’s presidential candidate, led to a new reform that significantly changed the character
of the IFE. The reform formally established the figure of “Citizen Councilor,” giving the Cham-
ber of Deputies the right to independently appoint six of the eleven council members. In addition,
the reform gave an official role to both national and international electoral observers in the elec-
toral process and created the special prosecutor for electoral crimes (FEPADE) (Pozas Horcasitas,
1996).
One of the most important influences on the 1994 electoral reform, as well as on the later
1996 reform, was the activism of non-profit electoral watchdog groups. The leading group dur-
ing this period was Alianza Cívica. For the 1994 elections, this group mobilized over 12,000
national electoral observers and 400 international observers, carried out its own parallel “quick
count” of the electoral results, published a report on bias in media coverage of the campaigns as
well as a guide for electoral observers and a final evaluation of the election as a whole (Olvera,
2001).
The 1996 reform finally allowed Mexico to begin to turn the corner from authoritarianism to
democracy. The 1996 reform was the first one negotiated, designed and implemented by all of
the important actors from all three of the main parties from the left, right and center. The reform
finally put the IFE under the exclusive control of the Citizen Council members (removing the
6. An example is the notorious “governance clause” first established in the 1986 reform that required the
party that won the majority of direct election seats to receive enough proportional seats in order to control
over 50 percent of the Chamber of Deputies. This was then expanded in the 1990 reform by requiring that
the dominant party only win 42 percent of the direct election seats in order to be assured of an absolute
majority in the lower house.
7. The computer system that was counting the votes suddenly “crashed” on election night as the opposi-
tion candidate was taking the lead and then mysteriously showed the official party’s candidate as the victor
with 51 percent of the votes a week later.
right to vote from the representatives from the executive, the legislature and the political parties),
created a fully independent Federal Electoral Tribunal, vastly increased public funding for political
parties, improved fairness in access to the media, controlled private campaign contributions, and
took the crucial step of granting political independence and elections for the leadership of the
Mexico City Government (Becerra, Salazar and Woldenberg, 2000).
Nevertheless, the PRI’s continued control over the political system allowed it to build various
important flaws into the structure of the IFE even in 1996. Regardless, the fact that there has not
been a new electoral reform since 1996 is a testament to the great breakthrough this reform rep-
resented, and the legitimacy that it continues to enjoy through today.
From this brief history, it is evident that both state and society actors have participated active-
ly in the construction of the IFE. Social mobilization from below has consistently pushed for and
stimulated electoral reform. Because the authoritarian regime needed to legitimize its power, it
was forced to respond to the protests through negotiation instead of violence. In addition, the
active participation of “political society” (that is, political parties) from the full ideological spec-
trum has allowed for development of constructive and consensus-based solutions. Finally, as the
role of Alianza Cívica demonstrates, many of the practices that were finally institutionalized by
the state have their roots in civil society itself.
Continuing Challenges
Experts, nevertheless, have pointed out some important areas in which the operation of the IFE
is far less than perfect. These include:
1. The fact that the General Council is simultaneously responsible for directing and monitor-
ing the activities of the core administrative structure leads to organizational confusion. As
a result of this structure, each branch, or Executive Directorate, of the IFE is both
accountable in vertical fashion to the Executive Secretary and through him/her to the
President of the General Council and finally to the General Council as a whole and in a
horizontal fashion to one of the special commissions formed by the General Council to
monitor the activities of each directorate. This double authority structure has led to many
inefficiencies and ineffectiveness as council members and administrative officers are simul-
taneously pulled in two directions at once (Schedler, 1999b).
2. The IFE lacks sufficient autonomy from the forces of partisan politics. The budget is not
independently set by the law but has to pass through the same channels as any other
budget item each year. This forces the leadership of the IFE to lobby the executive and
the legislative branch each year in order to defend its budget, a position that opens it up
to the world of quid pro quo politics that can seriously harm its independence (Cárdenas
Gracia, 2000).
3. The IFE does not have enough power to conduct full audits of the political parties. For
instance, as has been widely publicized over the last two years, the Law of Bank Secrecy
has been interpreted by the courts and the federal government in a way that prevents the
IFE from having direct access to the bank accounts of the political parties. In addition, there
is no law that regulates the financing of primary elections or the financing of propaganda or
promotion activities used before the beginning of the official campaign period (Woldenberg,
2002).
4. The IFE does not have sufficient powers to control and punish the illegal use of govern-
ment funds for electoral purposes or prevent the purchasing and manipulation of voters.
Although the IFE can force political parties to pay heavy fines and cancel party registra-
tion, it cannot directly prosecute government bureaucrats, party members or normal citi-
zens for wrongdoing. The most it can do in this area is refer cases to the Special Attorney
for Electoral Affairs (FEPADE) in the Attorney General’s office, an agency that is heavily
underfunded and highly vulnerable to political manipulation as a result of its location
within the executive branch (Cárdenas Gracia, 2000).
Although scholars disagree as to whether the IFE needs minor tinkering or a full institutional
overhaul, most agree that these four problems are the most important. In addition, it does not
appear that these problems exist simply because of sloppy institutional design. To the contrary,
the historical record shows that they are the result of an explicit intention to undermine the
accountability process by the authoritarian regime that has been in power throughout most of the
IFE’s institutional life.
Lessons Learned
This case study offers a number of important lessons for state reformers. First, it confirms the
willingness and capacity of poor people to participate in the activities of governance. The mobi-
lization of over one million ordinary citizens as organizers and observers of polling booths in the
last federal election is a clear testament to the fact that the poor are interested in more than
immediate material survival, government handouts and clientelistic politics. Poor people are also
passionate about issues of justice, equality and accountability, and are extraordinarily willing and
able to participate bringing about change, if given a chance.
Nevertheless, the important second lesson is that this capacity of civil society does not arise
magically or spontaneously on its own but depends on how government itself behaves. Normal
citizens will only participate at such massive levels in positive “synergistic” ways, as opposed to
using more confrontational strategies, if the policies being implemented are seen to respond to
demands that have originated in civil society, are designed with the participation of a broad range
of actors, and actively incorporate citizens into the process of implementation itself. The rule of
equal and opposite reaction applies here once again. Governments who want to earn the trust
and participation of civil society in pro-accountability activities need to start by themselves trust-
ing civil society and actively opening up state institutions to participation. In addition, as in the
Porto Alegre case, it is important for the government to involve the population at large by reach-
ing out and offering training workshops in order to avoid getting stuck with the already existing
societal actors as their only interlocutors.
Third, none of the achievements of the IFE would have been possible without a significant
amount of resources dedicated to the reform and operation of the IFE itself. Societal participa-
tion is best stimulated when it is perceived as a complement rather than as a replacement for gov-
ernment action. Without the core group of 2,500 civil servants, significant salaries for the General
Council and a large operating budget (US$480 million in the year 2000; IFE, 2000b), the IFE
would not have been able to successfully carry out its tasks nor stimulate the popular legitimacy it
needed in order to involve the active participation of civil society.
Fourth, this case shows us the importance of independent agencies, super majority rules,8
constitutionally mandated budgets, no reelection provisions, and civil service reforms for main-
taining the neutral, nonpartisan nature of pro-accountability institutions. We cannot depend on
an abstract idea of professionalism alone to do the job nor allow ourselves to be blinded by the
traditional tripartite way of thinking about the division of powers. There are many creative ways
to design new institutions in order to defend fundamental elements of the democratic process
beyond the tosses and turns of electoral politics. The experience of the IFE suggests various posi-
tive, as well as negative, lessons for future reformers.
Fifth, the case of the IFE forces us to question the commonly accepted idea that neutrality
arises exclusively out of the absence of partisanship. Although some of the IFE’s effectiveness does
indeed arise out of the professionalization and nonpartisanship of its staff, a great deal of its legitimacy
8. An example is the notorious “governance clause” first established in the 1986 reform that required the
party that won the majority of direct election seats to receive enough proportional seats in order to control
over 50 percent of the Chamber of Deputies. This was then expanded in the 1990 reform by requiring that
the dominant party only win 42 percent of the direct election seats in order to be assured of an absolute
majority in the lower house.
also arises out of the saturation of partisanship or the radical plurality of those who participate in
the decision making processes of the IFE. The General Council is made up of nine citizen council
members, but also surrounded by a whirlwind of party representatives and media “intrusions.”
Each voting booth is staffed by trained members of civil society, but also intensively watched by
representatives from each political party. One of the principal reasons why the electoral reform of
1996 was more effective than the reforms of 1990 and 1994 is because a greater diversity of
political positions were taken into account at the negotiating table in 1996 than during the other
two reforms. Democracy and accountability can and do feed off each other in a positive feedback
cycle. There is no need to separate the two with an artificial divide between participation and
professionalism or conflict and consensus.
These lessons are useful far beyond the realm of electoral administration. The model of an
independent institute that effectively balances the mobilization of civil society with a highly pro-
fessional bureaucratic corps while institutionalizing a vast array of horizontal, vertical, and diago-
nal accountability relationships has a wide range of applications. In recent years, numerous inde-
pendent corruption control institutes, autonomous auditing agencies, public prosecutors, and
human rights ombudsmen have sprung up throughout the LCR and the rest of the developing
world (see Pope, 2000; Cárdenas Gracia, 2000). Reformers working on designing and imple-
menting these institutions have much to learn from the case of the IFE. In addition, when the
electoral administration is understood as another example of government service delivery, the case
of the IFE gains even wider relevance. There is no reason to believe that the struggle to make the
delivery of other goods and services in the LCR equally “free and fair” cannot follow a similar
path as that followed to clean up Mexico’s elections.
Case #3: Police and School Reform in Chicago

Like many cities in the LCR, Chicago has a “tradition of machine politics, insular administrative
bureaucracies installed in reaction to political manipulations, a vibrant tradition of neighborhood
activism [and] extreme socioeconomic inequality” (Fung, 2001). A recent study by Archon Fung
explores how the Chicago city government has improved the performance of its schools and
police forces by actively incorporating the participation of civil society. As in both of the previous
two cases, the Chicago government has gone far beyond simple consultative or advisory methods
of participation to open itself up to diagonal participation by normal citizens.
Chicago School Reform

This is particularly true in the case of school reform. In 1988 the city assembly passed the Chicago
School Reform Act which created a “local school council” (LSC), comprised of six parents, two
community representatives, two teachers, the school’s principal, and an additional nonvoting
students for high schools, for each of the Chicago Public School’s (CPS) 530 elementary and
high schools. The LSC’s have four principal tasks.
First, LSCs are responsible for hiring, firing, evaluating, and determining the job definitions of the
principals of each school. Second, they approve school budgets. [Third,] LSCs also develop a
required document called the School Improvement Plan (SIP). SIPs are three-year, long-term plans
that articulate improvement goals (attendance, graduation rates, achievement levels, school envi-
ronment) and steps necessary to reach those goals. The principal has primary responsibility for
implementing the plan, while the council is charged with monitoring progress. Finally, reform leg-
islation shifted control of “Chapter 1” funds, discretionary state monies allocated to schools on the
basis of economic disadvantage, to the LSCs. (Fung, 2001)
As Fung points out, these reforms made the Chicago school system one of the most open to
participation in the entire United States. As in Porto Alegre and with the IFE, normal citizens are
endowed with government authority, thus breaking the clean split between vertical and horizon-
tal accountability mechanisms.
Chicago Police Reform

Police reform is also interesting even though it did not as clearly empower citizens. The 1995
reform of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) organized police officers into 279 “beat teams”
that are required to hold open community meetings each month in order for “the officers serving
the area and its residents to jointly engage in problem identification and resolution efforts”
(Fung, 2001). Here the mode of participation is more akin to what has been defined as society-
driven horizontal accountability. Citizens are not actually given any direct legal power over the
operations of the police. They simply provide information and can try to pressure the officers to
attend to specific problems. Nevertheless, the close citizen oversight of the police activities does
serve as a powerful accountability mechanism, because citizens’ complaints can trigger existing
internal mechanisms of supervision and control.
Statistical evaluations are difficult given the number of different factors that can have an
impact on school performance and crime rates. Nevertheless, there is significant evidence that both
services have greatly improved as a result of the reforms. For instance, Fung (2001) points out that
between 1994 and 1998 the murder rate declined 24 percent, robbery fell 31 percent and sexual
assault fell 21 percent in Chicago, results that are comparable to radically different “zero-tolerance”
strategies like those imposed by Rudolph Giuliani in New York. In addition, school performance as
measured by a specially developed “metric of school productivity” shows that between 1987 and
1997 “while students entering the system have become increasingly disadvantaged and less well
prepared, the majority of schools have become more effective in educating them.”
One of the most important elements of institutional design that Fung emphasizes is the con-
cept of “accountable autonomy.” The central idea here is to break the false dichotomy between
centralization and decentralization. The important issue is not whether the center or the periph-
ery should have more power, but what sort of power each actor can most effectively wield.
According to Fung (2001), in both cases “the role of central power shifts fundamentally from
that of directing local units (in the previous hierarchical system) to that of supporting local units
in their own problem-solving endeavors and holding them accountable to the norms of delibera-
tion and achievement of demanding but feasible public outcomes.” For example, while local
school councils in Chicago are responsible for drawing up budgets and sanctioning principals they
are also simultaneously monitored and evaluated by central agencies. This adds an interesting new
twist to the theoretical discussion of accountability because local participative bodies are account-
able to centralized bureaucratic agencies. Instead of civil society holding government accountable,
it is now government that is holding civil society accountable.
Background
The origins of the two reforms are quite distinct. School reform arose out of conflict and was
driven by social participation.
In the Chicago schools, reform resulted from a pitched battle that pitted a diverse social movement
composed of parent organizations, “good government” civic groups, educational reform activists,
and a coalition of business groups against traditional school insiders such as the Chicago Teacher’s
Union and the Board of Education. (Fung, 2001)
Police reform arose out of consensus and was principally directed by reformers within the state.
“Absent the street heat and legislative pressure that drove school reform, [the reform] discus-
sions at the intersection of professional, political and civic interests led quietly to the formula-
tion of a participatory variant of community policing…” (Fung, 2001). The important point here
is that in general, “far from the result of masterful design, these institutions arose haphazardly-
themselves the result of fitful informal deliberations—as reformers inside city offices and activists
outside of it groped toward more effective ways of organizing their police departments and
schools” (Fung, 2001).
Once again, the importance of both state and society actors in the development of the partic-
ipation mechanisms is evident. Indeed, perhaps the relative lack of social participation in the
design of the police reform is one of the principal reasons why this reform did not end up
empowering citizens as much as the school reform. Regardless, it is clear that neither reform
arose solely out of the action of individual enlightened bureaucrats, but each was the result of
complex social processes and state-society synergies.
Lessons Learned
These Chicago cases reinforce the above lessons concerning pro-accountability reforms. First, as
in Porto Alegre and with the IFE, the most active participants in Chicago are the poor and uned-
ucated. “Contrary to skeptical expectations that reforms demanding active participation will fur-
ther disadvantage less well-off areas, residents of poor neighborhoods participate at rates equal to
or greater than those from wealthy ones” (Fung, 2001). In addition, Fung points out that
“whereas previous studies have found that African Americans and people of Hispanic
backgrounds [in Chicago] are somewhat less likely to vote than others, higher proportions of
black and Hispanic students in a school correlated with slightly higher parental turnout rates in
the 1996 LSC elections.”
Second, Chicago reformers also made a concerted effort to open the process far beyond
already organized civil society and, especially in the case of police reform, used government
employed community organizers to stimulate participation and facilitate community decision
making. Nevertheless, the accountability mechanisms in Chicago were clearly not as open and
participatory as those in place in the previous two cases. The local school councils are elected
bodies that do not bring a clear popular mandate arising out of popular assemblies like the COP
in Porto Alegre and, as discussed above, the police community meetings do not have any direct
legal authority over police behavior. Perhaps this is why the level of citizen participation in Chica-
go is also much lower than it is in Porto Alegre and Mexico. Fung documents that an average of
only 20-25 people participate in each beat meeting per month and there are only an average of
1.5 candidates in the elections for each open spot in the school councils.
Third, civil society participation in the design phase of participatory structures proved to be
crucial. Neither of the Chicago reforms arose purely out of the minds of social planners and their
relative success depended on the ability of the government to involve social actors from the very
beginning.
Fourth, as in Porto Alegre and with the IFE, the supply side of the equation is crucial. With-
out a capable and well-financed state apparatus that can actually respond to popular demands and
participation, such accountability mechanisms would create more disenchantment than hope.
Indeed, this point raises important questions as to the exportability of the police reform case to
Latin America. How effective would community meetings be in a situation of widespread police
corruption and an almost total lack of trust in local police forces?
Fifth, these cases push us further towards the conclusion that the supposed either/or choice
between centralization and decentralization is a false dichotomy that needs to be reanalyzed.
Although devolving power is important, there is an equal need to strengthen the center, at least
in its coordinating and monitoring capacities.
Case #4: Decentralization and Rural Development in Mexico

As seen above, decentralization is just as likely to strengthen entrenched local networks of corrup-
tion, clientelism and capture as it is to promote participation and accountability. More money for
local government alone will not make governments more responsive or accountable. Good results
depend on the institutional and social structure of the local units that are empowered by devolu-
tion. This is the central lesson of Jonathan Fox’s research on the use of World Bank funds for
municipal development projects in rural Mexico.
Horizontal Social Capital

For Fox, the most important element of a pro-accountability “enabling environment” is the exis-
tence of strong social practices of mutual trust and cooperation (or “horizontal social capital”; Fox,
2002). Such social networks are key under both authoritarian and democratic arrangements.
Under authoritarian situations, in which local officials are imposed from the outside, strong hori-
zontal social capital allows communities to pressure for the honest and effective use of public funds.
Under democratic situations, horizontal social capital allows communities to better channel invest-
ments towards more productive, long-term development projects that benefit the most poor, as
opposed to short-term porkbarrel or politically-oriented populist projects (Fox and Aranda, 1996).
The level of horizontal social capital in a particular community or region is dependent on
local history, cultural traditions and political institutions. For Fox, social capital is eminently
“constructible” (Evans, 1996). This contrasts with Putnam’s (1993) classic study of Italy where
the relationship between good government and social capital is almost entirely one way, with
stocks of social capital that have accumulated for over 500 years explaining different levels of
government effectiveness. In contrast, Fox (2002) argues that institutional design has a clear and
direct impact on the development of social capital in the relatively short-term. The relationship
between social capital and good government is a two-way street. For instance, “widespread com-
munity participation can improve governance, promoting improved transparency and public
accountability, while a government in the hands of local elites, who govern from above, can
inhibit the participative potential of civil society” (my translation).
A series of studies by Fox on Mexico’s Municipal Funds Program give ample evidence of the
impact of social capital and institutional design on state-society synergy for accountability.
Although issues of legal accountability are an implicit subtext throughout the studies, the focus is
fundamentally on performance accountability. The Mexican Municipal Funds program has been
almost entirely financed by two large loans received from the World Bank, one for US$350 mil-
lion for the period from 1991-1994 and a second for US$500 million for the period from 1995-
1999. This money was targeted for use in basic infrastructure improvements (for example, pave-
ment, schools, potable water, sanitation) for the poorest communities in the rural areas of the
poorest states.
The program was implemented through municipal governments and, particularly during the
first period, accountability mechanisms were developed to allow citizens to directly participate in
the planning and the implementation of the projects. Specifically, autonomous “solidarity com-
mittees” were organized in each community in close coordination with the municipal govern-
ment. These committees were responsible for deciding which projects would be funded and for
contributing the necessary labor power. Because the Solidarity Committees did not have any legal
standing or formal authority over the Municipal Funds program itself, the actual level of partici-
pation and the real autonomy of the committees from the municipal, state, or federal government
depended entirely on the way in which local leaders and citizens approached the task. Needless to
say, a great number of committees only had a significant participation in the implementation
phase of the projects and were entirely excluded from the planning phase.
The Oaxaca Case

This participatory mechanism was particularly successful in the state of Oaxaca. In this state “the
community assemblies made the project selection decisions in almost two-thirds of the cases (63
percent of projects observed were chosen by community assemblies)” (Fox and Aranda, 1996).
One of the principal reasons for such high levels of participation is because Oaxaca is endowed
with a very high level of horizontal social capital due to a long and rich indigenous tradition of
community collaboration, trust and self-governance. For instance,
most rural Oaxaca communities already had active local public works committees, as part of their
ethnically based system of rotating community responsibilities. In most of rural Oaxaca, these posi-
tions are chosen through community consensus and are unpaid, full-time responsibilities…In the
smaller villages, most Municipal Funds projects seemed to be taken on by these preexisting com-
mittees led by municipal authorities, such as the town council or the local agente municipal.” (Fox
and Aranda, 1996)
This also speaks well of the government side of the equation in Oaxaca. Instead of imposing
a new organizational structure on society, a healthy amount of mixing between state and social
forms was permitted. As the Porto Alegre and the IFE cases suggest, state-society synergy is par-
ticularly successful when the governmental design of participatory institutions corresponds to pre-
existing practices within civil society. In Oaxaca, this tolerance of autonomous social forms goes
back much further than the Municipal Funds program. The state’s municipal structure itself, with
570 different municipalities based in local organizational forms, demonstrates the government’s
long-standing commitment to accommodate legal forms to traditional practices.
Significantly, the communities that had higher and more authentic levels of participation had
more effective development projects. “Community assembly decision making produced dispro-
portionately better projects, while project selection by mayors and external actors tended to pro-
duce insignificant projects”(Fox and Aranda, 1996). When the community was directly involved,
it tended to monitor the use of funds more closely and to pick projects that were more clearly
useful for the population as a whole. When the selection process was manipulated from outside,
investment tended to be shifted towards highly visible, although not always useful, projects. For
instance, although mayors and external actors tended to be partial to projects like basketball
courts and paved roads, assemblies were more likely to opt for more useful investments like
potable water systems or corn mills.
After the beginning of the program, the government also explicitly intervened to increase
community participation and to make the distribution of resources more fair. The formulas used
for poverty measurement and funds distribution were improved and, even more importantly,
made public. The amount of funds that could be spent in the municipal capital was limited to
25 percent, thus requiring municipalities to channel funds to the most needy, isolated areas.
Finally, the required amount of community contributions was made variable, depending on the
impact on poverty the selected project would have. High impact projects required less communi-
ty contribution than low impact projects, thus encouraging investment in true “public goods”
(Fox and Aranda, 1996; Fox, 2002).
These changes stimulated community participation and strengthened social capital because
they made communities aware of their right to a precise amount of funds, actively involved the
poorest areas, and empowered those actors who looked beyond their particular interests and
towards the development of the community as a whole. This demonstrates the direct effect insti-
tutional reform can have on trust, fairness and participation. As Fox writes,
The maintenance of trust requires trustworthy local institutions that can give strength to relations
of mutual responsibility…[For example,] if the local governments utilize transparent and consistent
criteria in the selection of more consolidated projects first and give priority to high levels of partici-
pation, then this will work as a material incentive for the least cohesive communities to reach
agreements about their proposals for future projects. Here, it is once again important to recognize
that the logic of citizen participation, its justification, depends in part on the possibility that there
is public accountability and transparency, and vice versa. (Fox, 2001, my translation)
Nevertheless, one important element that sets this case apart from the first three cases consid-
ered is that the origins of this particular scheme of state-society synergy for accountability was
entirely “top-down.” Instead of arising out of intense negotiations between social actors and
government reformers, the participation scheme was thought up and designed by the federal
government in consultation with World Bank staff. This may go a long way in explaining why
community participation has not been more dynamic in the Municipal Funds Program, and why
the case of Oaxaca is more of an exception than the rule. Indeed, the “top-down” nature of the
entire National Solidarity Program (PRONASOL), of which the Municipal Funds program was
only a part, has led many scholars to disqualify it entirely as an attempt at social manipulation
intended to help the PRI and the powerful interests it defends remain in control.
By reinstating the PRI’s role as a welfare machine, PRONASOL has enabled the PRI to regain its
position as centerpiece of the party system…Neoliberalism demands an aggressive political and ide-
ological remaking, not simply the implementation of economic measures. PRONASOL entails
both. The Salinas administration is presenting neoliberalism as a hegemonic project, and at the
same time it is using Solidarity to create a durable base of support for the project in civil society.
(Dresser, 1994)
PRONASOL is neither an attempt to alleviate the poverty afflicting well over half of the popula-
tion in Mexico nor a move toward constructing a stronger civil society in a top-down fashion.
Instead it is a reflection of new forms of ideological and political domination targeted at preserving
the hegemony of the ruling classes while excluding the majority of Mexicans from participating in
the formulation of state policy. (Soederberg, 2001)
This evaluation of the program as a whole is solidly supported by the extreme level of pro-
government propaganda that accompanied almost every step of the Solidarity Program. More-
over, the distribution of solidarity funds corresponded much more closely to political criteria than
to need-based criteria (see Cornelius, Craig and Fox, 1994). Nevertheless, these well documented
facts should not lead us to ignore exceptional cases like Oaxaca that support the prospect of state-
society synergy for accountability even under relatively unfriendly conditions.
Lessons Learned
There are various lessons to be learned from this case study. First, as seen in the previous three
case studies, the direct involvement of social actors from the initial design stage is absolutely cru-
cial for the success of accountability mechanisms that depend on active participation from civil
society. Second, this case also confirms the importance of the formal, legal empowerment of par-
ticipatory bodies. Without a clear institutionalized location in the decision making process, these
bodies are left open to the winds of manipulation and are quickly bypassed by unwilling or
authoritarian public officials.
Third, this case suggests the crucial importance of horizontal social capital for the success
of participatory pro-accountability arrangements. Without some level of community trust and
cooperation it is difficult to foment participation that is in the interests of all as opposed to
only the most powerful in a particular community. Finally, this case also shows us the crucial
impact that government transparency and institutional design have on the development of this
type of social capital. Only when government actors respect social actors enough to fully
inform them as to the design and implementations of development programs and design the
participatory institutions so as to assure the active involvement of the most marginal actors,
will state-society synergy be able to truly fulfill its promise of making government more
accountable.
Case #5: Toxics Release Inventory in the United States

The case of the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) in the United States is particularly fascinating
because it seems to break with many of the above lessons on how successfully to promote state-
society synergy for accountability. As Archon Fung and Dara O’Rourke have written,
TRI is an accidental success story of regulatory reform. Designed to do much less, the program has
proven to be one of the most successful programs to reduce toxics in EPA history. In the past 10
years, the small program has eclipsed its initial goals of providing information for community plan-
ners, igniting a “right-to-know” movement in the US, and supporting both industry and environ-
mentalists’ efforts to reduce toxics. (Fung and O’Rourke, 1998)
The TRI is essentially only a pollution accounting system. Developed by the government in
19869 in a top-down fashion in order to help community planning and in the aftermath of the
Bhopal chemical disaster, the TRI requires manufacturing firms to report their annual emissions
of 651 toxic chemicals to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This information is
reported by the firms themselves with very little follow up by the EPA (only about 3 percent of
firms are inspected each year) and then made widely available via print and internet media by the
government. In total, the government only invests US$23 million in the TRI each year, much
less than the tens of billions spent under the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts.
A Self-Perpetuating Virtuous Circle

The TRI has been incredibly successful. Between 1988 and 1995 total releases and transfers of
330 of the chemicals on the TRI list decreased by over 45 percent (U.S. Environmental Protec-
tion Agency, 1995). This means that roughly 1.3 billion pounds less of toxic chemicals were
emitted in 1995 than in 1988 (Fung and O’Rourke, 1998). These numbers compare quite favor-
ably to other EPA activities. “Though data are difficult to compare and particular causes of
reductions highly contested among experts, it is arguable that the TRI has dramatically out-per-
formed all other EPA regulations over the last 10 years in terms of overall toxics reductions, and
that it has done so at a fraction of the cost of those other programs” (Fung and O’Rourke,
1998). This overstates things somewhat since the many statutory requirements on the books are
also clearly responsible for the reduction of toxic releases. Nevertheless, the TRI can most likely
claim at least a part of this success as its own.
According to Fung and O’Rourke, the effectiveness of the TRI is principally due to its capac-
ity to stimulate the participation of civil society in the reduction of toxic chemical releases. The
way it does this is by fomenting what the authors call “Populist Maxi-Min Regulation.” This is a
kind of “environmental blacklisting” by which the TRI database allows groups in society (for
example, environmentalists, businessmen, community activists, and journalists) to clearly see
which corporations pollute more than others.
Many of these users—especially journalists and environmentalists—use this information to identify

and target the most egregious polluters…Public pressure-sometimes in the form of community
mobilization and sometimes not often induces these firms to reduce their toxics releases. Others
who are not specifically blacklisted improve their environmental performance to avoid the potential
negative consequences of being identified as worst in their class…. The mechanism thus induces
continual reduction of toxic releases by pressuring whoever happens to fall at the bottom of the
list. (Fung and O’Rourke, 1998)
This is called “populist” because civil society, not government, does most of the enforcement. It
is “maxi-min” because the maximum pressure is placed on the worst polluters.
The TRI database works both directly and indirectly to reduce pollution through the partici-
pation of civil society. It functions directly by generating a great deal of negative publicity and
public pressure against those corporations that are the worst in their class. This creates immediate
problems in terms of operations and sales, and can also seriously affect stock-prices as conscien-
tious investors pull out their support and more pragmatic ones follow.
It also functions indirectly by inspiring fear in all firms that are not at the bottom of the list.
It is clearly in the interests of managers to invest relatively small amounts of money in making
sure that they are not the worst polluters rather then spending huge amounts to defend them-
selves against a public relations nightmare. Because this is true for all corporations, the tendency
is for emissions to go down across the board. As a result, the overall level of “worst performance”
9. The TRI was included as a part of the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act passed by
congress in 1986.
will improve, leading to a situation in which the pressure only increases on all corporations to
even further improve their levels of pollution in order not to be caught at the end of the list. This
creates a seemingly endless virtuous cycle of environmental improvement.
This apparent limitlessness is reinforced by the fact that normal citizens usually have very
different criteria for evaluating “acceptable” levels of pollution than do government bureaucrats.
As O’Rourke has written elsewhere,
Community members in general are much more interested in results—that is, pollution reduction—
than in inspections, reports, EIAs [Environmental Impact Assessments], or even agreements to build
treatment plants. Mobilized communities thus serve as an expansive team of monitors to follow-up
on inspections and promises of improvement. (O’Rourke, 2001)
Because citizens directly feel the impact of pollution, they are interested in its immediate and
complete elimination. Their tolerable level of pollution is usually much lower than the acceptable
level for a government regulator who is distanced from the real human impacts of environmental
destruction.
Recommendations for the Future

As Fung and O’Rourke point out, in spite of the success of the TRI, there is still much more that
needs to be done. In spite of the success of the society-driven aspect of the TRI, the government
still needs to clamp down more on the reporting requirements and should set clearer minimum
standards. On the other hand, the government could also do much more to directly enable the
participation of social actors in holding corporations accountable for their toxic emissions. For
instance, Fung and O’Rourke (1998) propose that the EPA should consider setting up “Offices of
Community Assistance” that “supply technical support to citizen groups that must live with highly
polluting facilities” and supporting “Community Based Organizations or other Non-Governmental
Organizations (NGOs) to run community environmental assistance programs.”
Indeed, as Don Sherman Grant has recently argued, even the present day effectiveness of
the TRI depends a great deal on more pro-active state efforts to stimulate societal participation.
Sherman Grant conducts a statistical analysis of TRI numbers for states that have implemented
the “right-to-sue” provision of the 1986 Superfund Act and those that have dedicated significant
funding to “right-to-know” programs. He concludes that when states are actively engaged in
empowering societal actors the success of society-driven environmental regulation is much higher.
For Sherman Grant this confirms the conclusions of “conflict researchers” who emphasize that,
the success of participatory policies is contingent on the resources they mobilize on behalf of citi-
zens. Policies that emphasize consciousness-raising activities and provide citizens perfunctory hear-
ings to act on their new insights will not give citizens any real leverage in their dealings with indus-
trial polluters. Only policies that are conflict oriented, that are supported financially by the state,
and that provide citizens with critical resources of information, network support, legal powers, and
so on, are likely to motivate businesses to reduce their emissions. (Sherman Grant, 1997)
Even in the case of the TRI, state-society synergy for accountability needs to be conscientiously
cultivated by the state in order for it to be effective. Information alone is not enough.
Lessons Learned
This case study leaves us with a few important lessons. First, institutional reform can have unex-
pected consequences. Even relatively controlled openings from above like the TRI can detonate
significant societal participation in the enforcement of accountability. This is particularly the case
when the issue directly impacts specific groups of people and when civil society already has con-
solidated organizations (for example, environmentalist groups, media, and community organiza-
tions) that are prepared to apply the necessary pressure. Second, even under such conditions,
the state still has the responsibility to enforce regulations from above and to facilitate the partici-
pation of civil society from below. It is not enough to simply publish information or survey data
and then sit back to await the response of civil society, especially in countries where civil society
organizations are weak. Third, societal actors can often be more effective if, once stimulated and
empowered, they are left to enforce regulations on their own. As evidenced above, much of the
success of the TRI has been due to the detonation of an autonomous social movement that con-
stantly and mercilessly pressures corporations to reduce their pollution levels.
Case #6: Women’s Police Stations in Brazil

In 1985, the state government of Sao Paulo, Brazil opened the first all-female police station (del-
egacia de defensa da mulher-DDM) in the world.
The idea behind its creation was that the traditional institutional response to grievances of violence
against women was inadequate and even discriminatory. Police, almost always men, routinely
ignored and rarely prosecuted cases of physical and sexual abuse of women and often blamed and
harassed the victims. (Nelson, 2002)
Here the central accountability issue is equal treatment and fairness. Police forces throughout the
world consistently treat violence against women as a private issue to be worked out within the
family and therefore refuse to intervene to correct the problem. The creation of separate police
stations run by women, with women and for women redresses this problem by extending the rule
of law down to the level of the family and inter-gender relations. By 1995, there were 126
DDMs operating in the state of Sao Paulo and over 200 more in Brazil (Nelson, 2002).
Background
DDMs originated in civil society in three different ways. First, various high profile cases of violence
against women between 1979 and 1985 brought the issue of judicial unfairness towards women
into the spotlight. For instance, the courts initially accepted the defense of “violent emotion” in
the cases of Raúl Doca Street and Lindomar Castilho, both of whom had murdered their female
partners. Only after widespread protest and publicity were these two men given long jail sentences.
Second, many non-profit organizations, like SOS-Mulher, began to offer independent assis-
tance to women who were victims of violence. These organizations set up centers that provided
emotional support and legal council to victims. Lack of funds limited the social impact of these
activities, but they nonetheless offered an excellent example for what government could do if and
when it had the interest in addressing the issue (Nelson, 2002).
Third, when the opposition Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB) won
the Sao Paulo state government in 1982, it established a State Council on the Status of Women
(CECF) comprised of both representatives from women’s organizations and state-level govern-
ment administrative departments (for example, education and health). This new council was
then the central motivating force for the establishment of the DDMs in Brazil. This state-socie-
ty body helped design the initial proposal for the women’s police stations (Nelson, 2002).
In the beginning, there was also close collaboration between the state and civil society groups
in the implementation of the DDM model. Before starting work at a DDM, female police officers
were required to attend intensive seminars run by members of the women’s movement on gender
relations and the specificities of violence against women. “According to the coordinator of the
CECF’s commission on violence, this meeting between members of the women’s movement and
police personnel dispelled the initial tension and helped establish a positive relationship between
the two, as well as opening a channel for future input from the activists”(Nelson, 2002). Never-
theless, as the number of DDMs expanded and the initial excitement for the project wore off
within the government, the project quickly fell exclusively under state direction. Activists, com-
munity groups and non-profits were soon cut off from the DDRs and the specialized training
itself was eliminated.
Mixed Results/Lessons Learned

One of the most important reasons why the initiative has had such mixed results was due precisely
to this pullback from civil society. On the one hand, it has been extremely successful in publicizing
violence against women and moving the issue of gender equality squarely into the public debate.
For instance, during the first half of 1994 alone there were 54,472 incidents of violence against
women registered in the state of Sao Paulo alone (Nelson, 2002). Also, the very existence of so
many public institutions designed explicitly for women publicizes the need for extra support.
On the other hand, the DDMs’ actual performance was less than might have been expected.
Of the 54,472 incidents “only 16,219 (roughly one-third) of these cases resulted in a police
investigation and far fewer still in prosecution or conviction. The large majority of reported cases
are simply archived and forgotten” (Nelson, 2002). In addition, much of the previous mistreat-
ment of women who reported crimes has continued, now at the hands of fellow women.
The fundamental rasion d’etre of the DDMs is to compensate for the sexist practices of the male-
dominated criminal justice system in which they are located. However, the absence of special training
programs to educate officers about issues relevant to gender-specific violence couples with a lack of
social work professionals seriously compromises crucial components of the DDMs’ function…In the
absence of such training, the DDMs’ performance will predictably be unsatisfactory. Indeed, my inter-
views with DDM personnel suggest that women are no more “naturally” compassionate and respon-
sive to their sisters’ needs than men. (Nelson, 2002)
When the institutionalization of social demands and practices is not carried out with the active
collaboration of society itself, it risks missing the crucial core of the demands themselves. The
original demand for more fair treatment for women and with women has ended up being institu-
tionalized only as a demand for treatment by women.
A second reason for the spotty performance of the DDMs may arise from issues of unsuccess-
ful institutional design.
The capacity of the DDMs to fulfill many of their original objectives is necessarily limited by their
problematic position within the police bureaucracy—problematic because the DDMs were created
in resistance to the very male-dominated criminal justice system in which they themselves are locat-
ed. In order to exist and proliferate, they must succeed at the basic police duties with which they
are charged. Yet they must also, in a sense, fail, or otherwise pose a threat to the legitimacy of the
police bureaucracy. That is, they must perform their bureaucratic function while concealing the
feminist premises upon which they were founded. (Nelson, 2002)
As seen previously with the case of the IFE, the institutional location of new initiatives of state-
society synergy is absolutely crucial. Such creative new ideas not only need positive enabling envi-
ronments in society, they also need such environments within the state itself. Any new institution,
and especially participative ones, also need time as well as support from within the state to develop
and flourish.
Finally, the party basis of the governments that try to implement pro-accountability reforms
is also important. For instance, the fact that the PMDB is not as closely linked to social move-
ments and community activists as the PT may go a long way in explaining why participation was
not successfully institutionalized in Sao Paulo while it was in Porto Alegre. Here once again the
echoes of the situation with the IFE are seen, in which the authoritarian coalition intentionally
undermined its own pro-accountability innovation. Governments that arise out of popular move-
ments tend to be those most willing and able to incorporate these movements in the work of
governance.
This case leaves us with the crucial lesson that the active participation of civil society in the
development of pro-accountability proposals hardly guarantees the institutionalization of this
participation or the long-term success of the proposal. Only when participation finds a supportive
institutional home and serious government actors who are willing to involve social actors in the
process of development and maintenance of the new project will state-society synergy for
accountability be fully successful. It is not enough for the state to simply respond to social
demands, it must also work with society to make these real.
Case #7: Grass-Roots Anti-Corruption Initiatives in India

One area of government that seems to be particularly resistant to opening itself up to societal
participation is the auditing of government expenditure. This task is usually seen to be far too
technically sophisticated and politically delicate to be opened to the average citizen. As Anne
Marie Goetz and Rob Jenkins argue,
there is almost nowhere on earth that citizens or their associations have either been given access
and information on, let alone a more substantive role in, formal auditing processes. Indeed, even in
the far less sensitive area of expenditure planning, there is just a handful of experimental cases
world-wide encouraging citizen involvement. Citizen auditing strikes at the heart of practices that
preserve the powers of bureaucrats and politicians: the secrecy in public accounts that can mask the
use of public funds for personal advantage. (Goetz and Jenkins, 2001)
Freedom-of-information acts have recently started to sprout up around the world, and citizens
are frequently encouraged to use public information to pressure corporations or governments
from the outside to comply with their duties or to decide their votes. Yet, it is difficult to find
examples in which normal citizens are as directly involved in the activity of auditing government
expenditure as they are, for example, in the activity of budget planning in Porto Alegre.
Independent Grassroots Initiatives

Nevertheless, the cases of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) movement in Rajasthan,
India and the Rationing Kruti Samiti (RKS), or Action Committee for Rationing, movement
based in Mumbai, India, show that when reformist bureaucrats are faced with an active pro-
accountability movement in civil society, it is possible to make important inroads into the area of
social auditing. As Goetz and Jenkins document, the central accountability problem that both of
these organizations face is the widespread corruption in the provision of government services to
the poor. Wages for public works projects are frequently skimmed off by public managers and the
materials used in these projects are often artificially over-priced and of bad quality so as to allow
the maximum room for kickbacks. In addition, the nation’s Public Distribution System (PDS),
which is in charge of channeling basic food items and other fundamental household goods like
kerosene to the poorest households, is rife with corruption. One of the principal problems here is
the selling of these goods by owners of “ration shops” for personal profit.
Most communities in India already have local “participatory” institutions that are supposedly
responsible for monitoring the performance of government programs. Nevertheless, these
“Vigilance Committees” and “Village Assemblies” are often captured by actors who are implicat-
ed in the process of corruption itself. For instance, the Vigilance Committees are usually chaired
by the representative of the municipal ward and their members are appointed in a top-down fash-
ion. As Goetz and Jenkins (2001) argue, “appointment to [vigilance] committees through a
process of official selection increases the probability of capture by the very political organizations
that are central to the operation of the systems of leakage.” In addition, “since many ration shops
are actually owned or controlled by politicians, who are themselves on the vigilance committees,
committee members have little incentive to remain eternally vigilant.” Finally, often the shop-
keepers themselves sit on the Vigilance Committees, thus setting up a situation in which the audi-
tor and the “auditee” are the same person. The situation is not much better with respect to the
Village Assemblies. Goetz and Jenkins (1999a) write that although these are recognized in the
constitution, in most parts of Rajasthan where the MKSS works they are “moribund political
institutions whose democratic functioning is impaired by the continued existence of constraining
social institutions.”
As a result of the failure of these state run participatory mechanisms, movements like MKSS
and RKS have found it necessary to create their own autonomous society-driven mechanisms for
auditing public projects. The MKSS has developed a methodology through which they independ-
ently investigate government spending practices and then expose and compare this information to
reality through public hearings (jan sun wai).
These hearings are the culmination of a methodology for reviewing local government accounts and
determining whether funds were expended on the development works in the manner indicated in
official records. Meticulous research is conducted in the weeks prior to the public hearing. The first
step is to procure government expenditure accounts, including receipts for building materials pur-
chased and employment-wage registers. Sometimes this information is given willingly by sympa-
thetic senior bureaucrats; at other times, filching by low-level clerks connected with the MKSS has
proven effective. The implied threat of agitation and protest provides a background inducement for
co-operation by officials. (Goetz and Jenkins, 2001)
In the hearings themselves obvious discrepancies and missing accounts are presented and the
public is given the opportunity to check their own personal experience as public employees or
providers with the accounts. Public officials themselves often attend and many cases exist in
which this process has worked to directly shame them into returning large amounts of “misdirect-
ed” funds.
The process has been extremely difficult because of the lack of a strong freedom-of-information
act in India. As a result, the MKSS and its allies have been forced to develop a second, comple-
mentary strategy.
Although successful in exposing corruption in a number of localities, jan sunwais have been rela-
tively rare because of the difficulty in obtaining certified copies of government accounts from
reluctant officials. In response, the MKSS and its allies in Rajasthan’s large and diverse voluntary
sector developed a parallel strategy involving large-scale public protests extending over several
weeks. The objective: legislative and regulatory reforms to provide a legal basis for local efforts to
obtain official documents. (Jenkins and Goetz, 1999a)
These mobilizations have been quite successful. A state-level Right to Information Act was passed
by the Rajasthan state assemble in May, 2000, and the state’s Local Government Law has been
modified to include “mandatory legal procedures for the investigation of corruption and to insti-
tutionalize officially the public-hearing audit method at the village assembly (Gram Sabha)
level”(Goetz and Jenkins, 2001).
The work of the MKSS is only starting to have an impact on government accountability in one
small part of India. Nevertheless, it gives us a fascinating alternative model to so-called “participa-
tive” mechanisms like the Bangalore Scorecard, which is limited to simply surveying and reporting
on the opinion of the public concerning the performance of government services. As Jenkins and
Goetz (1999a) argue, such initiatives are grounded in a fundamentally naïve view of politics and
bureaucratic inefficiency. According to the authors, the findings of the Bangalore Scorecards,
can be considered “weapons” only if the politicians and bureaucrats in question are ignorant of the
service-delivery problems in the first place. Most, in fact, are already aware of the dismal state of
public amenities in India’s slums. The MKSS approach begins from the assumption that what
would motivate officials to take remedial action is concrete evidence of their complicity in misap-
propriating funds intended for addressing these problems. A right to information makes this possi-
ble, though not inevitable. It requires associations of people willing to confront authority.
Bureaucrats need to be made directly accountable to the citizenry, and the best way to do that is
to allow citizens to get involved in the activity of auditing from the inside and to directly confront
bureaucrats with their complicity in the lack of performance or the corruption that exists in the
delivery of public goods and services.
Goetz and Jenkins present the case of the RKS in Mumbai as another example of such diago-
nal accountability. The RKS usually only advocates for policy reform from the outside, but recent-
ly they have decided to get involved in directly monitoring the operation of the PDS. Because the
official Vigilance Committees are ineffective, the RKS has developed its own parallel system of
informal vigilance committees. For each ration shop, five local women who are clients of the shop
come together to monitor and evaluate the quality and prices of the goods being sold. This activ-
ity has been facilitated by the RKS citywide campaign to oblige shop owners to publicly display
prices as well as samples of the goods on sale. The reports of the informal committees are then
put together and presented both to the user community and to the central coordinating bureau-
cracy of the PDS in the city.
This process was particularly successful during the period immediately following the 1992
riots in Mumbai, after which the city government was very interested in being perceived as being
responsive to the poor. In addition, during this period an important reform-minded bureaucrat
held the job of Regional Controller of Rationing. Nevertheless, in the end,
this joint civil society-state monitoring initiative was undermined by politics. State politicians were
infuriated that their control over the PDS had been undermined by a bureaucrat and a group of
CBOs [Community Based Organizations]. Without state support for its work, the RKS has had to
return to more conflictual but rather ad hoc tactics (such as city-wide protest action and sustained
community pressure on individual shopkeepers) to pressure local shopkeepers to leak smaller
amounts to the open market. (Goetz and Jenkins, 2001)
The authors therefore claim that the RKS’s experience with diagonal accountability has been only
a “limited success story.” As seen with the case of the MKSS, society-driven pro-accountability
initiatives that confront the state and demand inclusion in the basic activities of government can
be highly effective. Nevertheless, the RKS experience also shows us that ultimately the success of
these movements often also depends on constructing alliances with progressive government offi-
cials as well.
Lessons Learned
From this pair of cases, various lessons can be gleaned. First, state-society synergy for accountabil-
ity does not need to begin with reformist or progressive government politicians or bureaucrats or
be based in consensus between government officials and social actors. Success can also arise out
of the action of independent organizations and social movements that press their demands on the
state and push their way into the auditing of government programs. Second, it seems that at
some point in the process these movements do need allies within the government. Without state
support or at least tolerance, such movements will most likely be repressed or rendered ineffective
by state action. Third, both of these cases show that public auditing is not beyond the capacity of
poor, illiterate citizens. “Both cases are notable for engaging the very poor in scrutiny of official
accountability processes, challenging assumptions that the socially marginal and illiterate may lack
the human capital or long-term vision to invest in efforts to improve the quality of governance, as
opposed to efforts to improve their immediate survival prospects” (Goetz and Jenkins, 2001).
CHAPTER 4
LESSONS FOR THE WORLD

BANK
The image of the good bureaucrat—carefully insulated from constituents-has its usefulness, but openness
to the role of the “co-producer”… may be the best way to increase effectiveness and ultimately the best
way to preserve the integrity of increasingly besieged public institutions
—Evans (1996b)
I
n the introduction the question was posed as to how the relationship between state and socie-
ty can be best transformed from a tradition of particularistic concessions and manipulations.
How can a new partnership of healthy engagement be forged that produces a solid bureau-
cratic apparatus and policy outcomes that are in the interest of the public as a whole? The discus-
sion above shows that in order to answer this question, two dangerous myths about the poor and
marginalized people of the developing world need to be broken: (a) the assumption that they are
apathetic, easily manipulated and incapable of participating in the central activities of governance;
and, (b) the belief that they are raucous, inherently conflict oriented and untrustworthy.
Both of these myths are especially dangerous because they are self-perpetuating. When gov-
ernment institutions act on these assumptions they tend to reinforce the idea that they might be
true. For instance, if public officials hide information from the people, the population does
indeed become less informed and more apathetic, but through no fault of its own. When the
authorities respond to street marches with violence, the almost inevitable outcome is an increase
in protest and the expanded use of confrontational strategies on the part of civil society.
Fortunately, both of these myths about the comportment and capacities of common citizens
are entirely false. As each one of the above case studies show, poor people are exceptionally willing
and able to work with government in constructive ways once they perceive that their participation can
make a difference. In addition, effective societal participation is by no means limited to the provi-
sion of basic services. The poor care about much more than simple survival and local issues. The
above case studies demonstrate how normal citizens can get passionately involved in issues as
abstract and technical as financial accounting and school administration and as broad and universal
37
as environmental protection and free and fair elections. It is a grave mistake to think that the poor
are incapable of mobilizing themselves in the pursuit of larger social goals.
Therefore, the very first step for government reformers looking to construct state-society synergy
for accountability is to trust and actively involve societal actors from the very beginning of the process.
Reformers should not wait for civil society to start trusting government nor should they wait to
involve society until after the government has already designed a new participatory mechanism
from above. As each of the above case studies show, the earlier societal actors are involved in the
design process, the more effective the participatory measures.
There is also a significant difference between a full and partial opening of the state to societal
participation. The three most effective examples of state-society synergy summarized above
(Porto Alegre’s participatory budget, Mexico’s electoral institute and Chicago’s school councils)
are all cases in which the government encouraged societal participation to reach far beyond direct
vertical accountability and society-driven horizontal accountability to achieve full diagonal
accountability in which society directly carries out activities that normally correspond to the state.
Also, the government can only get out of society as much as it puts into it. In addition to open-
ing up new spaces for participation, the government should actively recruit and train new actors
in civil society. Although it is important to work with groups that are already organized, it is
equally crucial to reach out to the unorganized majority and to show them that their participa-
tion matters as well.
Nevertheless, it is also important to point out that those state reformers who find themselves
with limited resources or staff to implement full participatory schemes should also take heart from
the above case studies. The cases of the Municipal Funds program in Mexico, the Toxics Release
Inventory in the United States and the grassroots anti-corruption initiatives in India show that even
a small opening from above can sometimes stimulate the action of civil society in productive ways. Small
efforts are much better than nothing. State-society synergy is not an “all or nothing” endeavor.
Both those reformers who pursue limited schemes and those who engage with society more fully
should consider granting effective participatory structures official, legal status as soon as possible. As
seen in the case of the Municipal Funds program, the formalization of even limited top-down
participatory schemes allowed for the development of much fuller participation, especially in
those areas that already had important participatory resources like horizontal social capital. The
cases of the RKS in Mumbai, India and the women’s police stations in Brazil provide us with
important negative examples of this same point. Here the absence of a clear legal framework left
participation up to the whims of individual bureaucrats, leading to the eventual overturning of
participatory schemes once there was a change of heart on the part of government. Finally, the
difference between the two Chicago cases also reveals the importance of formalizing participatory
procedures. One of the major reasons why the school reform has been more effective than the
police reform is because the former institutionalized the involvement of civil society in the formal
legal structure much more clearly and explicitly than the latter.
In addition, professionalism and well-financed independent bureaucracies are central elements
of successful state-society synergies. Societal actors are much more willing to participate if they see
that they are not replacing but complementing the activities of government and if they are able to
dialogue with government representatives who are serious about their jobs. Also, societal actors
are easily disappointed if the government is not able to deliver the goods at the end of the day—
a situation that could leave state-society relations even worse than if no attempt to reach out had
been undertaken in the first place.
The above case studies also force the question as to the commonly accepted idea that the absence of
partisanship and political conflict is the only fertile ground for neutrality and accountability. Profes-
sionalism and independence is necessary but by no means sufficient to assure the long-term sur-
vival of accountability. In order to survive, pro-accountability structures need to be legitimated by
society both at their founding moment and during their everyday operations. This requires the
multiplication, not the reduction, of external eyes and the diversification, not unification, of politi-
cal and ideological perspectives. The history of Mexico’s electoral institute and the experiences of
the Toxics Release Inventory in the United States and the grassroots anti-corruption initiatives in
India provide particularly good examples of this. Indeed, as the last two examples show, some-
times the most effective strategy for state reformers might be to stimulate dynamic social move-
ments and social protest and let them take the lead in pressuring and undermining the power of
recalcitrant elements of the state.
Another pair of lessons involves the importance of institutional location. It makes a signifi-
cant difference whether the structures of state-society synergy are developed within already existing
public agencies/programs or within newly created ones. As seen in the cases of Mexico’s electoral
institute, Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting process and Mexico’s Municipal Funds program,
it is much easier to institute innovative reforms within new agencies and programs that have not
yet consolidated a tradition of top-down bureaucratic politics. The case of the women’s police
stations offers a negative example of the same issue. One of the major reasons for the limited
success of these police stations has been the fact that they remain as part of the police bureaucra-
cy that they were designed to question in the first place. At the same time, state-society synergy
seems to be more easily stimulated within autonomous agencies than within the massive bureaucratic
apparatus of the executive branch. Both Porto Alegre and the IFE provide fascinating examples of
the promise of constructing independent entities responsible for aspects of public management
grounded in state-society synergy.
These case studies also show that decentralization alone does not automatically facilitate the
increased participation of civil society or an improvement in the accountability of government.
Although devolution and decentralization are important because they bring government closer
to the people, if carried out blindly, they tend to reinforce inequalities both within the newly
autonomous local units as well as between them. Local power holders are allowed to run free,
and underprivileged localities are abandoned to their own devices. Decentralization is only
productive if the center remains responsible for the supervision and coordination of activities in
the local units. This is demonstrated above by the experiences of school and police reform in
Chicago, the Municipal Funds program in Mexico and the participatory budgeting process in
Porto Alegre.
In sum, this text has revealed that active societal participation can be an absolutely crucial
resource in the strengthening of bureaucracies throughout the developing world. This is an
important conclusion, but it also brings up a series of new questions: What concrete tools can be
offered to state reformers? What are good entry points for the application of such strategies? How
can we assure that the participatory mechanisms implemented are sustainable and go beyond the
occasional peaks in popular participation that characterize normal politics?
The best way to find answers to these and other such follow-up questions is to speak directly
with those government innovators and civil society leaders and organizations who have participat-
ed in the design and implementation of successful experiences of state-society synergy. Hands-on
experience is the best source for practical lessons. Nevertheless, from the above discussion, some
general rules of thumb for World Bank personnel can be extracted:
1. Marketization is not the only way to tap into the energy of society. Privatization and sub-
contracting may be highly effective for some policy areas at specific times and places. Nev-
ertheless, it is often even more fruitful to invite society into the state instead of sending
sections of the state off to society. The participative school of the New Public Manage-
ment (NPM) frequently can be even more effective than the market school (Peters, 2001).
The specific advantages of state-society synergy over marketization are:
a. It retains the comparative advantage that the state has over the market in the provision
of public goods, natural monopolies, basic necessities, and goods that require long
term planning and development.
b. It keeps transaction costs to the minimum by permitting the focused coordination of
multiple programs with parallel goals.
c. It allows citizens to ground their demands for effective service delivery in rights-based
discourse (as “citizens”), instead of exclusively in the language of consumer protection
(as “consumers”).
d. It avoids the inequality producing effects of market based service delivery.
State reformers should think twice before assuming that marketization is the best and only
way to apply the NPM. Careful attention needs to be put on the type of good or service
being provided, the increase in transaction costs marketization might provoke, the possible
loss of strength in the accountability signal when citizens are replaced with consumers,
and the potential for increases in inequality that can arise from marketization.
2. Transparency is key, but not enough on its own. Opening up the dark chambers of the
state to the eyes of the public is a major move forward, but it is only a first step. Govern-
ments cannot expect information provision to single handedly and spontaneously generate
the positive feedback loops between state and society outlined in the above case studies.
Governments need to be encouraged to directly stimulate the participation of society and
to institutionalize mechanisms of state-society relations. Otherwise, the only actors who
will actually put to use the new information are journalists, academics and non-profit
organizations. Although these groups are indeed crucial in maintaining accountability, the
above case studies show that there is a qualitative forward leap when the population at
large, and the poor in particular, are directly involved in enforcing accountability as well.
3. The best entry points are those where there are previously existing social demands and
practices surrounding a particular accountability issue. The participatory budgeting initia-
tive in Porto Alegre was initially proposed by the Union of Residents’ Association, the
system of electoral observers in Mexico was first put into practice by Alianza Cívica, the
Local School Councils in Chicago were actively demanded by poor communities through-
out Chicago, the successful implementation of the Municipal Funds Program in Oaxaca
depended on its ability to tap into local cooperative traditions and horizontal social capital,
the Toxics Release Inventory was so successful because of the active environmentalist com-
munity in the United States, the initial successful stage of the women’s police stations in
Brazil arose out of social pressure and was modeled on already existing societal practices,
and the actions of RKS and MKSS in India have been fundamental in increasing accounta-
bility in the subcontinent.
This does not mean that state-society synergy is only effective where there is a highly
developed middle class, a lack of social conflict or in relatively simple policy areas. The
above cases reveal that normal citizens are extraordinarily capable of participating in highly
complex tasks and that there is no need for civil society already to be well behaved or
unified prior to the implementation of innovative participative mechanisms. What this
does say is that such mechanisms are most effective when state reformers respond to
demands articulated by society and actively work with society to design and implement the
participatory schemes.
4. Once initiated, the best way to assure the sustainability of a participatory framework is
through its full institutionalization. There are three different levels at which participatory
mechanisms can be institutionalized. First, participatory mechanisms can be built into the
strategic plans of government agencies and rules and procedures can be mandated that
require street-level bureaucrats to consult or otherwise engage with societal actors. Second,
specific government agencies can be created that have the goal of assuring societal partici-
pation in government activities or act as a liaison in change of building links with societal
actors. Third, participatory mechanisms can be inscribed in law, requiring individual agen-
cies or the government as a whole to involve societal actors at specific moments of the
public policy process.
Although the first level of institutionalization is more or less widespread in LCR and
the second level is relatively common, the third level is extremely rare. There are some
exceptions, including some of the above cases as well as Bolivia’s Law of Popular Participa-
tion (Oxhorn, 2001) and Mexico City’s Law of Citizen Participation (Mellado Hernández,
2001). Nevertheless, these exceptions only prove the rule that participatory mechanisms
are usually vastly under-institutionalized, depending too much on the ingenuity and good
will of individual bureaucrats.
Why this is the case is more or less evident. Law making under democratic conditions
involves the messy process of legislative bargaining and a full role for political parties. State
reformers and multilateral agencies tend to shy away from such arenas, especially when
they are dominated by opposing parties or factions. Therefore, reformers usually settle for
executive procedures, special agencies or innovative individual bureaucrats to carry out
their participative strategies.
This is a mistake. As the above case studies shows, if dealt with in a creative fashion
partisanship can be just as effective as isolation in the search for effective accountability
mechanisms. It is absolutely crucial to involve political parties and the legislature in order
to fully institutionalize participative mechanisms through the law.
5. Legal institutionalization is important but it is not enough. Both the executive branch as a
whole as well as the project directors and street-level bureaucrats need to be committed to
the importance of the participatory mechanisms. Otherwise, the law risks becoming dead
letter. This is particularly crucial in situations where the government as a whole has a low
level of legitimacy. In such cases the immediate assumption of the population is that par-
ticipatory mechanisms are only sophisticated new forms of reverse vertical accountability
or manipulation of the people by the government. This can easily create a negative feed-
back loop between state and society that can easily undermine even the most sophisticated
and powerful new law.
There are a few strategies that state reformers can use in order to prevent such a downward
spiral from occurring. First, individuals with highly respected track records, well developed
administrative capacities and creative intelligence should be chosen to lead the implementation of
the law in the executive branch. Second, civil society organizations should be invited to help train
both government bureaucrats and societal actors in the art of participation and group decision
making from the very beginning of the implementation phase. Third, a concerted attempt should
be made to involve the widest diversity of perspectives possible from organized and unorganized
civil and political society.
CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION
T
his paper has argued that the active involvement of civil society and the strengthening of
the state apparatus are not mutually exclusive or even contradictory initiatives. This is the
central idea of “state-society synergy” as a concept. If institutions are properly designed, a
virtuous cycle that reinforces both state and society is possible. This is particularly important to
emphasize today given the thrust of much of the new public management literature that proposes
the devolution of state responsibilities to social actors via the market. The above cases show that
the empowerment of society does not have to pass through the weakening or reduction of the
size or the capacities of the state (see Annex A—Summary of Case Studies). Indeed, they show
that exactly the opposite is true. Both state and society are best strengthened by establishing
mechanisms that allow each side to stimulate the other, thus creating a positive feedback loop
that can lead to significant improvements in governance in the short, medium and long terms
(see Annex B-Summary of Lessons for World Bank Staff).
In order to complement the research included in the present study, the World Bank could
play a useful role by continuing to contribute to research in this area two different directions.
First of all, by contacting the individuals and organizations involved in the design and implemen-
tation of the above-mentioned and other successful examples of state-society synergy for account-
ability, the general lessons included above could be complemented with more specific, technical
advice needed in order to reproduce these examples as best practices in other contexts. In addi-
tion, as the Bank continues to collect information on the implementation of similar initiatives
throughout the globe, a complete database could be created that can be used to test hypotheses
using statistical and quantitative methods.
43
ANNEX A
SUMMARY OF CASE STUDIES
45
46
ACCOUNTABILITY PRO-ACCOUNTABILITY
CASES PROBLEM MECHANISM RESULTS/LESSONS
Participatory Budgeting 1) Inefficiency, corruption and lack of Participatory Budgeting: Rapid improvement in infrastructure
Porto Alegre, Brazil equity in the deliverys of 10% of budget/Full opening to society. and public services in poor areas.
infrastructure and social services. Three levels of participation Promotes development of new
2) Clientelism within societal (neighborhood, district, citywide). social actors.
organizations. Weighted pro-poor voting system. Active participation of the poorest.
WORLD BANK WORKING PAPER
Active involvement of society at the Need to balance decentralization

design stage. and centralized supervision
Facilitates exit from clientelistic
groups.
Government outreach (paid
community organizers, district
centers, etc.).
Federal Electoral Institute 1) Capture of bureaucracy by a single Independent Electoral Institute: Unprecedented fairness of 2000
Mexico party/interest group. Autonomous citizen-run General elections.
2) Widespread corruption during Council. High levels of trust and legitimacy in
service delivery. Public meetings and party the new institution.
representation. Active participation of the poorest.
Active involvement of society at Value of the saturation of
design stage. partisanship.
Monitored by other government New independent agencies as
accounting agencies. strategic levers for state reform.
Strong civil service.
Training of 1 million volunteers
Police and School Reform Chicago Ineffective service delivery Local School Councils: Rapid improvement in service
Autonomous citizen-run supervisory delivery.
body. Active participation of the poorest.
Open elections of members.
Crucial importance of
Highly institutionalized power institutionalization.
(budget, hiring/firing of principal,
Need to balance decentralization
school improvement plan, etc.)
and centralized supervision
Result of public pressure
Community Policing:
Involvement of citizens in
identification of problems and
solutions.
Not fully institutionalized.
Decentralization and Rural 1) Inefficiency, corruption and lack of Solidarity Committees in Oaxaca: Importance of “horizontal social
Development equity in the delivery of Grounded in pre-existing social capital”
Mexico infrastructure. practices Importance of transparency
2) Clientelism within societal Publicity of distributive formula. Active participation of the poorest.
organizations. Requirements of within municipality Problem of “top-down” planning
resource distribution.
Problem of lack of institutionalization.
Legal loopholes and inefficient

STATE-SOCIETY SYNERGY
Toxics Release Inventory Toxics Release Inventory: Information can be powerful when
United States “top-down” enforcement of law and “Populist Maxi-Min Regulation.” put into action by societal actors
FOR
government regulations Pro-active state efforts to stimulate and interest groups.

participation. Synergy between societal
Active environmentalist community. mobilization and government
regulation.
(continued)
ACCOUNTABILITY 47
Continued 48
ACCOUNTABILITY PRO-ACCOUNTABILITY
CASES PROBLEM MECHANISM RESULTS/LESSONS
Women’s Police Stations Unfair treatment of a marginalized Women’s Police Stations: Decay of link between civil society
Brazil group by a government agency. Separate police stations run by and the state led to return of old
women, with women and for women. practices.
Grounded in previous social practice Importance of institutional location.
and stimulated by social mobilization.
Societal groups train public servants.
Grass-Roots Anti-Corruption 1) Inefficiency, corruption and lack of Social Auditing (MKSS): Active participation of the poorest
Initiatives equity in the delivery of Independent investigation of in highly abstract activities.
India infrastructure and social services. government expenditures. More participative alternative to
2) Captured previously existing Public hearings. relatively tame measures like the
participatory mechanisms. Public protests. “Bangalore Scorecard.”
Informal “Vigilance Committees” Importance of institutionalization of

(RKS): participatory mechanisms.
Autonomous supervision of ration Society driven accountability does
shops. not necessarily depend on the
Publicity of prices and samples. presence of reformist bureaucrats.
ANNEX B
SUMMARY OF LESSONS FOR

WORLD BANK STAFF
49
50
Starting Point Design Implementation Other
1) Consider comparative advantages 1) Work closely with societal actors in 1) Information and transparency should 1) Participative mechanisms should be
of participation versus the design of participative be complemented by outreach and seen as complements, not
marketization. mechanisms. active stimulation of societal replacements, for professional, well-
2) Respond to societal protest and 2) Fully institutionalize mechanisms participation. financed bureaucracies.
demands. through the law (engage with the 2) Encourage training of public officials 2) The multiplication of plurality and
3) Search for previously existing legislature and political parties). by societal actors. partisanship is often more effective
societal practices. 3) Full opening (“diagonal 3) Reform is easier in new and than isolation.
accountability”) holds much more independent agencies.
potential than partial opening 4) Decentralization should be
(“society-driven horizontal complemented by centralized
accountability,” “direct vertical supervision.
accountability”).
5) Select highly capable and reputable
individuals to lead state-society
synergy initiatives.
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State-Society Synergy for Accountability is part of the World
Bank Working Paper series. These papers are published to
communicate the results of the Bank’s ongoing research and
to stimulate public discussion.
The central question guiding this study is: How can the rela-
tionship between the state and society be transformed from a
process of particularistic demands into a healthier engage-
ment that produces policy outcomes serving the public inter-
est?
This paper first surveys the literature on accountability and

establishes a categorization of the different ways by which
civil society can interact with the state. It then explores in
detail seven case studies of successful experiences of state-
society synergy for accountability. The studies are drawn from
a wide range of different contexts (Brazil, India, Mexico, the
United States) and from a variety of different areas of govern-
ment activity including corruption control, environmental reg-
ulation, poverty reduction, election monitoring, infrastructure
provision, school reform, and police reform. The paper con-
cludes with a series of lessons for World Bank staff on how
best to initiate, design, and implement successful accountabil-
ity mechanisms grounded in state-society synergy.
World Bank Working Papers are available individually or by

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Table 1: FOUR DIMENSIONS OF STATE CAPACITY

Source: Adapted from Grindle 1996.

1. Participatory planning processes promote decisionmaking based on needs identified by

The Participation of Civil Society

FIGURE 1: ACCOUNTABILITY AND CIVIL SOCIETY

Case #1: Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil

Diagonal Accountability in Action

by introducing an unprecedented transparency in the formation, allocation and implementation of

Second, the budgeting process improves performance accountability by reducing clientelism

Origins of the Participatory Budgeting Process

Case #2: Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute

Combating Corruption, Clientelism and Capture

Mexico distinguishes itself through its successful institutionalization of democratic accountability

Case #3: Police and School Reform in Chicago

Chicago School Reform

Chicago Police Reform

Case #4: Decentralization and Rural Development in Mexico

Horizontal Social Capital

The Oaxaca Case

Case #5: Toxics Release Inventory in the United States

A Self-Perpetuating Virtuous Circle

Many of these users—especially journalists and environmentalists—use this information to identify

Recommendations for the Future

Case #6: Women’s Police Stations in Brazil

Mixed Results/Lessons Learned

Case #7: Grass-Roots Anti-Corruption Initiatives in India

Independent Grassroots Initiatives

LESSONS FOR THE WORLD

SUMMARY OF CASE STUDIES

Active involvement of society at the Need to balance decentralization

Legal loopholes and inefficient

government regulations Pro-active state efforts to stimulate and interest groups.

Informal “Vigilance Committees” Importance of institutionalization of

SUMMARY OF LESSONS FOR

Starting Point Design Implementation Other

Mellado Hernández, Roberto. 2001. Participación Ciudadana Institucionalizada y Gobernabilidad en la

This paper first surveys the literature on accountability and

World Bank Working Papers are available individually or by

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