MAINSTREAMING SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY

EXPERIENCES EMANATING FROM SOUTH ASIA

International Academic Conference on
Social Accountability in South and East Asia: Experiences,
Lessons And Challenges

19-September-2017
National Academy of Governance, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Accountability in Public Sector

 In public sector, Accountability discourse relates to the obligations of

public office holders to account for or take responsibility of their
decisions and actions

 Traditional accountability mechanisms have two distinct dimensions:

1. Constitutional dimension: public authorities are accountable to established
norms, rules and procedures to avert unfair practices and/or abuse of power
2. Performance dimension: public authorities are also accountable for their
performance and accomplishments.

 Realisation of accountability dimensions are attempted through

measures of,
 Answerability – public authorities are answerable for adherence to constitutional
norms, rule of law as well as their performance; and
 Enforcement – strengthening incentives for fulfilling mandated commitments and
applying sanctions for noncompliance
Horizontal and Vertical Accountability

Horizontal Accountability: The answerability and enforcement measures

usually imposed horizontally within the government through institutional
oversight mechanisms as well as mutual checks and balances:
 Legislative oversight on Executive Authorities
 Independent Judiciary
 Public Audit and Public Account Committees
 Public Administration Reporting Systems
 Human rights machineries
 Anti-corruption commissions et. al.

Vertical Accountability: Imposed externally by citizens to seek good

performance by their governments
→ formally through electoral processes;
→ indirectly through citizens and civil society, including mass media.

Elections are important mechanism of vertical accountability

 Citizens can make elected representatives answer for their policies and actions,
and enforce electoral retribution
Horizontal and Vertical Accountability

Source: Fostering Social Accountability. A Guidance Note. Oslo Governance Centre, UNDP (2010)
Defining Social Accountability

Malena and McNeil (2010) attempted to define Social

Accountability as
“… the broad range of actions and mechanisms beyond voting
that citizens can use to hold the state to account, as well as
actions on the part of government, civil society, media and other
societal actors that promote or facilitate these efforts.”

It is an inclusive approach that involves,

→ efforts of informed and engaged citizens, coordinated with
→ governmental reforms
towards improving government responsiveness and public
sector performance.
 SAcc as Vertical Accountability Measures
Grandvionnet et. al. (2015) have argued Social Accountability as the
interplay of three constitutive elements: information, citizen-state interface
and civic mobilisation towards enforcing vertical accountability measures
Social Accountability Experience : Bangladesh
Citizen Action for Results, Transparency and Accountability (CARTA)

 Supported 5 social accountability sub-projects for local CSOs to

independently carry out expenditures and results monitoring:
 Bangladesh Rural Water Supply & Sanitation Project (BRWSSP)
 Rural Electrical Renewable Energy Project 2 (REREP)
 Local Government Support Project II (LGSP)
 Reaching Out of School Children II (ROSC)
 Social Investment Program Project II (SIPP)

 Access to project information and building of capacity of citizens to act

on that information were central to these social accountability efforts

 Select outcomes of SA sub-projects:

 The service user committees of BRWSSP and RERED improved the levels of
users’ feedback, leading to improvement in service delivery.
 In LGSP-II, citizens were more engaged in decisions related to use of funds, and
owing to enhanced transparency citizens’ perceptions of corruption diminished.
Social Accountability Experience : India
Institutionalising Social Audit in MGNREGA Andhra Pradesh

 Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act

(MGNREGA) accorded legislative mandate to Social Audit.
 Section 17 of the Act mandates the regular conduct of social audits as
instrument for accountability in MGNREGA implementation

 Government of Andhra Pradesh has set up an independent society,

Society for Social Audit, Accountability and Transparency (SSAAT) to
conduct social audits of MGNREGA.
 SSAAT's resource personnel act as facilitators and train Village Social Auditors
(VSA) to conduct social audit in conjunction with the state government officials.
 The process includes public validation of the various stages of implementation.
 This is followed by 'Social Audit Public Hearings' where information gathered is
read out publicly, and people are given an opportunity to question officials, verify
expenditure records, and critically evaluate the quality of works.
 The process often goes beyond the realm of financial auditing and covers the
issues of equity and quality in programme implementation.

 SSAAT in recent years has also been entrusted with the mandate to
conduct social audits of other welfare schemes of the government.
Social Accountability Experience : India
Community Action for Health under National Health Mission

 Allows citizens to actively and regularly monitor the progress of the

National Health Mission (NHM) interventions in their areas.
 Implemented across 25 states of India covering more than 54% of districts

 The process involves:

 Creating community awareness on NHM entitlements, roles and responsibilities
of the service providers
 Strengthening of Village Health, Sanitation and Nutrition Committees (VHSNCs)
and Planning and Monitoring Committees (PMC)
 Undertaking community level enquiry to assess availability, range and quality of
health services, and towards developing Village Report Card.
 Organising public dialogue to highlight gaps and plan corrective action.
 Sample field validation of VRC by next higher level committee at Block and
District

 Significant improvement of certain aspects of health-provider

functioning: more regular staff attendance, public display of
information and stopping of illegal fees
Social Accountability Experience : Pakistan

Citizen Feedback Monitoring Programme

 To proactively solicits users' experience of accessing basic public

services in Punjab province.

 A government call center sends SMS messages and voice calls to

public service users to make targeted inquiries about
 satisfaction with 16 services, ranging from property registration to primary
health care and potential incidents of corruption; and
 whether they faced incidents of corruption.
 The user responses are logged and tracked on dashboards.

 Deployed at very large scale, with more than 7 million citizens

contacted and about 1 million of them have provided feedback
 Government of Punjab has taken more than 6,000 administrative actions against
officials based on the feedback.
Determinants for
Mainstreaming Social Accountability

Three key areas of relevance are:

 Policy, legal, and regulatory environment for civic engagement;
 Type of political system and tradition for open pluralistic debate; and
 Values and norms in society, and presence of societal institutions
that support (or inhibit) open pluralistic debate and constructive
engagement
The Sandwich Strategy for Success

Source: Fox, J. (2014). Social Accountability: What Does The Evidence Really Say? GPSA Working Paper No. 1