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Contributions from
the Column
Focus
Fragmented goals
E“We do not sit down and wait for assistance”
Squaring
the accountability triangle
“We need coherent national strategies”
Drugs are not enough
8-9/2005
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Squaring the accountability triangle
Recent trends in international development cooperation help to make donors more responsible in respect to the needs of poor people. This is a promising dynamic because social services have too often failed the most needy people in the past.
[ By Eugenio Villar and Rebecca Dodd ]
Since the early 1990s, development cooperation partners have paid increasing attention to the institutional and political dimensions of human development. Development actors began to recognise that poverty alleviation requires not only increased access to resources, but also action to address the structural inequities which create unfair distribution in the first place. At the same time, it was clear that tackling these root causes implied the creation of better public institutions geared towards the needs of the poor, improved governance and – above all – empowerment of marginalised groups to participate in democratic processes.
This new emphasis on governance and participation put pressure on donors and developing countries to increase the accountability and transparency of their actions. A milestone in this approach was the World Bank’s World Development Report 2004, entitled “Making Services work for poor people”. The Report acknowledged the failure of social services in respect to poor people. More significantly, it also proposed a new approach to address this failure: an approach which systematically considers the political and institutional dimensions that influence service planning, funding and delivery, and which focuses in particular on how these dynamics affect the poorest population groups.
The central thesis of the World Development Report was that accountability relationships – especially between decision makers, service providers and the poor clients – are key to the success and failure of service provision. This is an important step on from traditional analysis of public service failures, which focused on infrastructure, staff, financial resources and commodities. The World Bank’s “triangle of accountability” defined two routes linking the public in general with service providers (see diagramme). On the short route, providers must report to their clients (“client power”). On the long route, they are responsible to the government bureaucracy (“compact”) – the leaders of which, in turn, are made accountable in elections (“voice”). The World Development Report argued that strengthening accountability along these two routes would improve service delivery to the poor (see also D+C/E+Z, 2005:6, p. 254f).
The World Bank acknowledged that there is no single recipe for success. Rather, each country must develop its own methods for empowering the poor by monitoring and sanctioning service providers. Each country needs its own incentives for service providers to do better. They should also make sure that policy makers hear – and respond to – the demands of marginalised groups.
While the World Development Report did provide an important new tool for addressing development issues, it remains incomplete. In our view, donors should be included in the accountability framework as they are indispensable partners in development cooperation. Particularly in the case of highly aid-dependent countries, donors have a significant influence over governance, policy and – not least – funding of the public services. They need to be held accountable for the influence they exert.
Progress underway
Depending on their governance structure, donors are primarily accountable either to their domestic constituencies (bilaterals), to multilateral processes (United Nations, Bretton Woods Institutions), to private individuals and governing boards (Rockefeller Foundation, Gates Foundation), or to a combination of these (for instance, in the case of public-private partnerships). But it is also acknowledged that recipient countries should play a leading role in determining what donors do and how and where they do it. This is the crux of the donor accountability paradox: the institutions and people to which donors are formally accountable are not those best placed to guide their actions. Therefore, we need to find new ways for increasing “recipient power” over donors.
There are five important examples of such processes already under way at both country and global levels.
– First, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, which are developed and implemented by poor countries and supported by donors, help to ensure that aid is aligned with country (rather than donor) priorities, reducing the likelihood that donor funds will distort national priorities or undermine recipient accountability systems.
– Second, harmonisation between donors will help to lower transaction costs associated with aid and help to eliminate multiple – and sometimes conflicting – accountability routes between government and a variety of donors.
– Third, budget and sector support help to ensure that government retains full control over how resources are spent, and reduces donors’ influence; governments are then held accountable for their spending decisions by the electorate.
– Fourth, at global level, the Millennium Declaration and its key output the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), imply a new development paradigm in which rich and poor countries together agree a global compact to promote development. This compact includes explicit commitments by the rich world to increase aid levels and improve aid efficiency as well as an agreed set of priority goals and targets for poor countries.
Finally, the relevance of human rights to development is increasingly recognised. Such rights imply new accountability frameworks centred around citizens, especially the poorest. By advocating highly consensual and value-driven principles as well as through the establishment of new normative/legislative instruments, human rights can provide a platform for empowering marginalised groups (Overseas Development Institute, 2005; World Health Organisation, 2005).
These factors prove that the development community is already moving towards an accountability framework involving donors and recipients. The World Development Report noted the importance of donors’ interactions with actors at country level, and explicitly acknowledged that donors often by-pass existing accountability relationships for a variety of reasons. Donor relationships with the three corners of the accountability triangle can systematically be described as follows:
– Donors influence governments by providing resources and technical advice on the overall direction of poverty reduction efforts.
– There is a direct and indirect relationship between donors and service providers, for example when donors fund non-state actors to deliver services or when donors work to strengthen health and education systems.
– Finally, donors may have a direct relationship with citizens when they support national participatory processes (for example linked to PRSPs) or develop information or communication campaigns in support of government policies. While this line of accountability may be politically sensitive, it may also help to improve the legitimacy of the donor agency both within recipient countries and at home, by demonstrating that aid is responding directly to people’s needs.
Given these political, technical and financial influences, donors should be fully considered when accountability relationships are mapped out. In other words, the World Bank’s concepual triangle should become a rectangle (see diagramme).
Strengthening donor accountability in this context will help to strengthen accountability mechanisms in general. This is important because we know from social studies that institutional behaviour cannnot be expected to always prove rational. For instance, it does not always result in efficient or equitable use of resources. Rather, institutions are influenced by politics. In many developing countries, public services are geared towards the needs of the vocal urban elite. Therefore, checks and balances are needed.
Some challenges
As the poor are the weakest actors in accountability relations, they need to be empowered in order to hold service providers, governments and donors to account. This will not be possible without deliberate policies for doing so. At the same time, it must be ensured that vocal interest groups are not seen to represent “the poor” in general. Comprehensive frameworks such as PRSPs, overarching goals such as the MDGs, and negotiation spaces such as sector wide approaches remain indispensable to ensure that the demands of those who are really in need are considered.
Accountability relations between donors and national actors are highly context-specific and depend on the history, strength, legitimacy and power-base of national players. Relevant aspects include the set-up of particular state authorities, the type of donor and its governance structure, the degree of democratic representation; and the degree of social and economic inequity in the country concerned.
Strengthening accountability, accordingly, poses a particular challenge in fragile states where governance and institutional capacity are weak. In such cases, donors need to be even more careful that their actions do not distort or undermine emerging accountability relationships at the national level. Humanitarian relief, urgent and legitimate though it is, should always strive to strengthen accountability relations between citizens, civil society and legitimate governments. The UN should act as an honest broker in such circumstances.
Another issue that demands special attention is the role of donors vis-à-vis decentralisation. In principle, decentralisation implies transferring decision making powers from the central to lower levels of government and administration. In an ideal world, this would result in the shortening of the “long route” of accountability and make services correspond better to local needs. However, the results of decentralisation are mixed. Empowered local government does not necessarily result in empowered local citizens (Instituto Internacional de Gobernabilidad, 2005). All too often, local elites dominate the process crowding out the poor. Donors should play a role in averting such situations, ensuring that decentralisation does lead to more democratic and accountable governance. This can be done by cooperating with competent organisations of civil society – both at the international and national levels.
Dr. Eugenio Villar
works on pro-poor policy issues for the Department of MDGs, Health and Development Policy of the World Health Organisation in Geneva.
villare@who.int
Rebecca Dodd
works in the same WHO Department in Geneva.
doddb@who.int
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