Over the decades it has been greatly realized that institutions are bound to explain to the government about their activities, methods adopted in the production of services/ products and their financial status. The activities and schemes are increasingly coming under pressure to be more accountable to people. Accountable governance is a priority agenda among the good governance reform initiatives and social audit is recognized as an emerging powerful ‘accountability mechanism’. The following points outline the need for social accountability:
Social Accountability gives a mechanism to empower people to raise questions at the structural and functional levels. Not only is it a tool of empowerment but also Community Driven Development (CDD) process. CDD provides control of decisions and resources to community groups. The process considers people as assets and partners in the development process.
The gains from the social accountability process could be the inputs to reforms in the development sector pertaining to health, education, public administration, local governance, etc.
These accountability mechanisms are viewed important in empowering people to directly weed of corruption, leakages of funds, misappropriation of resources and other forms of malfunctioning.
The term ‘auditing’ describes a wider process of accounting for and reporting on social performance that is then externally verified. Social audit can be a process conducted in any institutions, departments, programmes, schemes and activities of the government machinery, corporate houses, business institutions etc.
Social accountability’s instrumental value is reflected in development effectiveness (through better service delivery) and better governance. For example, it can improve the targeting of projects and resources through better informed project and policy design, make institutions more responsible to people’s needs, increase transparency and reduce leakages of funds. The following figure explains these fundamentals.
Aspects of Social Accountability
Horizontal Accountability: This consists of formal relationships within the state itself, whereby one state actor has the formal authority to demand explanations or impose penalties on another. It thus concerns internal checks and oversight processes. For example, executive agencies must explain their decisions to legislatures, and can in some cases be overruled or sanctioned for procedural violations.
Vertical forms of accountability: These formsare those in which citizens and their associations play direct roles in holding the powerful to account. Elections are the formal institutional channel of vertical accountability. But there are also informal processes through which citizens organize themselves into associations capable of lobbying governments and private service providers, demanding explanations and threatening less formal sanctions, like negative publicity.
Diagonal Accountability: Diagonal accountability seeks to engage citizens directly in the workings of horizontal accountability institutions. This is an effort to augment the limited effectiveness of civil society’s watch dog function by breaking the state’s monopoly over responsibility for official executive oversight. The main principles of diagonal accountability are:
Participate in Horizontal Accountability Mechanisms– Community advocatesparticipate in institutions of horizontalaccountability, rather than creatingdistinct and separate institutions ofdiagonal accountability. In this way,agents of vertical accountability seek toinsert themselves more directly into thehorizontal axis.
Information flow – Community advocates are given an opportunity to access information about government agencies that would normally be limited to the horizontal axis, for instance internal performance reviews etc. Furthermore, they have access to the deliberations and reasons why horizontal accountability institutions make the decisions they do. Meanwhile, community advocates bring firsthand experience about the performance of the government agency to the accountability process.
Compel Officials to Answer– Community advocates co-opt the horizontal accountability institution’s authority to compel a government agency to answer questions (as in the example given above of an MP questioning a Minister about issues of concern to his/her constituents); and
Capacity to Sanction– Community advocates acquire the authority of the horizontal accountability institution to enforce the findings or influence elected officials.
‘Demand-side’ or ‘social’ accountability refers to these vertical and diagonal mechanisms. Accountability processes often require that the state or service provider explain and justify its actions to citizens, a process often referred to as ‘answerability’. Accountability is strengthened when a state or other power holder is obliged to fully disclose why it took the actions it did and on what evidence.
