Conceptual and Institutional Frameworks around Accountability and Citizen Participation

ENRIQUE PERUZZOTTI

Conferencia; Engaging Citizens in their Organizations to Prevent Corruption in the Delivery of Public Services; 2011

Naciones Unidas (UNDESA)

The chapter describes some of the most common uses of the term and establishes some distinctions among the different dimensions of the concept to then proceed to analyze a specific area of accountability politics: accountability initiatives that largely rely on or promote citizen participation with the hope of controlling corruption and improving the performance of public agencies in the provision of services and public goods. The narrowing the focus to only a subset of accountability initiatives means that the analysis will inevitably leave aside a significant part of contemporary debates on accountability like those that are exclusively interested in analyzing the dynamics of intra-state agencies of oversight or those which refer to initiatives to control the behavior of non-state actors such as NGOs, international organizations or corporations.   The goal of this chapter is to present the evolution of accountability debates and oversight institutions, with particular reference to those debates that specifically address accountability mechanisms for agencies in charge of providing public services. The chapter is structured as follows: section 2 presents a general overview of traditional conceptual approaches to democratic accountability. Section 3 focuses on two influential analytical classifications of accountability mechanisms: those that distinguish type of control that is being exercised and those that emphasize the arenas were the accountability agents are located. Section 4 discusses recent developments in the demand and supply side of accountability that have established a more complex scenario for the exercise of democratic accountability. The traditional (and simpler) model of governmental accountability can no longer adequately describe the current landscape of accountability relations and politics –a landscape that has become more dense due to the addition of a new set of citizens initiatives and tools that dramatically expanded the traditional repertoire of accountability agencies and mechanisms. It is thus necessary to rethink inherited notions of democratic accountability to conceptually incorporate recent developments. This is the objective of section 5 that introduces the concept of social accountability showing how different forms of civic engagement can enhance democratic accountability in all of its dimensions. Section 6 specifically analyses the role and performance of mechanisms of social accountability in the area of service provision focusing on two different accountability formats: those that promote external oversight of service provision agencies and officials and those that bring civic organizations into the decision-making process. The last section (7) raises some questions and issues that are generally raised about the limits and potentials of social accountability mechanisms and concludes with a call to adopt an encompassing understanding of accountability that effectively integrates traditional and social mechanisms in a way that results in a more equitable and effective distribution of public services to citizens.