Cronograma

As detailed in Table 3 (Chapter 2), the case study projects shared similar theories of change, as well as types of social accountability actions and interventions. Whether projects achieved and sustained expected outcomes, however, depended on the degree to which they confronted—and were able to overcome—barriers to social accountability.

To summarize the findings on sustainability, perhaps the most fundamental threat to continued social accountability is a lack of response from government actors to the priorities that citizens have identified. If the state does not respond, there is no room for further efforts from citizens to monitor implementation and channel subsequent needs. If they did not perceive a response, civil society actors in our case studies tended to shift their attention away from social accountability activities. In such instances, there was often a sense of dejection and regression of empowerment gains, with citizens seeing little use for continued advocacy for greater responsiveness from the state through the mechanisms established by projects. Some citizens reacted by shifting their energies to generating community resources to support needed improvements in services. While such behaviors could be interpreted as signs of coproduction, they verge on a form of forced privatization in which the state has effectively abdicated its responsibilities for delivering high-quality public services, shifting the burden to citizens.

Citizens could potentially have leveraged gains in empowerment to escalate to more confrontational social accountability actions in the face of government inaction (Gaventa & Barrett, 2012). In our case studies, however, no such reactions were reported, likely because of the relative novelty of social accountability actions and general constraints on voice and accountability in most of these country contexts (Figure 2, Chapter 2). Although some have suggested that even failed organizing experiences are a resource for citizens to draw on for future collective action (Hirschman, 1984), our cases indicated that gains in empowerment were threatened, at least in the short term, when the state failed to respond to social accountability efforts.

There were several reasons why government actors did not appear

responsive to citizens’ social accountability attempts (Figure 8). One was a lack of visibility of state response. In the Morocco case, for instance, state actors actually did incorporate citizen’s priorities from the Communal Development Plans into their budgets and plans and, in most municipalities, ensured that progress was made on implementing planned investments. However, these achievements were not communicated or readily evident to citizens, who therefore may be disinclined to channel priorities to the local government through CDP mechanisms in the future.

In several of the cases, officials who were the targets of social accountability actions lacked control over needed resources to initiate a response to

citizens’ identified priorities for improvements. In Indonesia, health center administrators had no control over their budgets and therefore were unable to provide greater amounts of needed medicines or more specialized services than they were allocated by district officials. In Morocco and Nigeria, it was district officials who lacked financial autonomy to address citizens’ expressed needs. In spite of past decentralization reforms in these countries, effective control over fiscal resources remained at higher levels of government.

Weak political support for social accountability also stymied responsiveness. This was most evident in NEI, where there was little commitment from state- level actors to respond to information and priorities channeled from citizens through planning mechanisms and budget proposals. Several projects tried to ensure political support by incorporating self-selection by local governments (LGP, LEAD) or specific reforms (Kinerja). The motivations behind such “voluntary” adoption of program interventions are complicated, however, and may reflect local constellations of power and access to resources rather than a desire to improve services (Wetterberg & Brinkerhoff, 2016). In the case studies, self-selection did not guarantee responsiveness at all sites.

Related to several of the other reasons for a weak state response were

unchanged attitudes toward citizen and state roles in service delivery, resulting in reluctance to embrace social accountability efforts at their intended level of action (Table 1, Chapter 2). Intended coproduction mechanisms—such as the Medium-Term Sector Strategies and the community education forums in NEI—produced transparency but little additional accountability. Kinerja’s complaint-handling surveys were often perceived by officials as confrontational, rather than collaborative; in some districts, social accountability actions offended providers, who initially refused to respond.

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Rather than enforce compliance as intended, PAQs and MSFs often played a coproduction role by mobilizing community members to utilize services. Even at Kinerja clinics where social accountability actions had produced positive service delivery outcomes, MSFs consistently perceived stronger accountability roles for themselves than providers did. Similarly, in Morocco, officials were not ready to accept the direct citizen scrutiny of decision making that the Commissions on Equity and Equal Opportunity provided. In China’s unsupportive context for social accountability, CSOs presented compliance- oriented advocacy as coproduction activities to garner official acceptance. While some of these softer social accountability actions had positive

outcomes, they underscore the difficulties of shifting officials’ attitudes to see responsiveness as essential to improving public services and to accept a greater role for citizens to engender such improvements, especially in contexts where government effectiveness in providing services is weak and there have been few prior opportunities for voice and accountability (Figure 1, Chapter 2).