Give citizens bigger role in quest for accountability
There is agreement that the government should be made more “accountable”.
ANTHONY BUTLER
Published:2012/02/03 08:35:52 AM
THERE is agreement that the government should be made more “accountable”. But political leaders cannot agree on how such accountability should be exercised.
Accountability has three main elements: answerability, or the obligation of public officials to tell citizens what they are doing; justification, or the requirement that ministers and officials give reasons for their decisions; and enforcement, whether through “soft” sanctions, such as public exposure, or harder sanctions, such as criminal prosecution.
It is proving hard to establish effective accountability systems to support a culture of public justification. In part, this is because our many benign technocrats have astatist and “horizontal” understanding of accountability.
Horizontal accountability — sometimes known as intra state accountability — refers to the capacity of public institutions to check the abuse of power by other state agencies. This is rarely effective on its own. Intrastate mechanisms operate largely behind closed doors and are vulnerable to political manipulation. Without the support of public exposure and citizen campaigns, scrupulous insiders and whistle-blowers can be easily marginalised.
Public sector accountability mechanisms are also hard to establish. They rely on performance management systems that take decades to entrench and require often unobtainable data on effect and outcomes. It is anyway hard to assess an individual’s responsibility for any process in which there are complex causes and effects, multiple partners in different sectors and spheres of government, elusive time lags and a high turnover of officials.
An over-reliance on intrastate systems, moreover, takes power further and further away from essential allies in the citizen body, whose energies and experience need to be engaged if officials and politicians are to be held to account for their actions.
The “vertical accountability” of the state and its officers directly to the people is currently exercised primarily through public protest campaigns, civil society movements, media exposure and, ultimately, electoral sanctions.
Service delivery protests suggest that many citizens have a desire to be heard. On their own, however, participatory mechanisms are largely impotent. Citizens are denied the information they need. Protest can be easily confined. And citizens can vote only infrequently.
The wisdom of ordinary citizens, however, can be productively harnessed. Officials and politicians must be forced to look downwards to the people instead of upwards to their managers and superiors. Lines of accountability can be shortened and central government can be relieved of the debilitating responsibility for resolving local problems.
Four mechanisms can be especially important in bringing intrastate and citizen accountability together.
First, a wider range of instruments must be developed to establish how citizens experience government service provision. This may require centrally collated data, for example on educational outcomes, but it should also involve client scorecards, exit surveys in public facilities and the use of cellphone technology to access samples of citizens.
Second, the knowledge, perceptions and working experiences of street-level government workers who interact directly with citizens, such as teachers, nurses and municipal officials, needs to be tapped to improve the quality of public services.
Third, internal markets or market-based voucher systems should on occasion be used to unlock the knowledge that citizens possess about the relative merits of different service providers.
Finally, existing mechanisms for involving citizens in accountability processes, such as school governing bodies, need to be strengthened and reproduced in other settings, such as public health clinics.
The mostly benevolent technocrats at the centre of the state are right to work on their own intrastate systems. But if they do not embrace citizens as their partners, they will not succeed in their quest for enhanced political accountability.
• Butler teaches politics at the University of Cape Town.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=164112
To read the AAI Accountability Theory Briefing Paper by Gemma Oberth, click below