Better design and implementation of social accountability tools
Successful social accountability interventions require a delicate balance amongst the following tasks: dissemination of accurate, verified, and relevant information; galvanising and mobilising citizens; monitoring and evaluation; enhancing citizen oversight of services; and organising interfaces between citizens and solution-holders. A full review of practices on social accountability in Zimbabwe would reveal that, while many initiatives focus mostly on information promotion or mobilisation activities, only a few initiatives concentrate on the monitoring of key national government processes and services. Striking a balance, in practice, between the technical know-how of using specific social accountability tools and political mobilisation of citizens is crucial. Interventions which use structured and/or semi-structured tools for monitoring of service delivery for example tend to better identify, articulate, and communicate service deficits to service providers. Given the prevailing context, these tools may also in the medium term serve as viable routes for accessing service delivery information for problem, solving purposes serving the interests of both service providers and recipients at the hyper-local level. While a rigid and technically sound social accountability tool may generate a great amount of citizen feedback and related data in a rather short period, the participation of citizens may be somewhat limited (as passive information providers), unless their participation is factored into the intervention design. Community ownership and inclusion through collective analyses, reflections and action must be augmented.
Mainstreaming participation of marginalised groups as change agents
The starting point for interventions in social accountability projects should be the nuancing of the diverse ways in which citizenship, marginality and accountability manifest themselves in different political contexts. It is these nuances – of political, economic, and social interactions and bargaining processes – that also reveal the agency possibilities, including identifying the interlocution processes and how they can be supported. The participation of women, people with disability, youth and other marginalised groups must be ensured by mainstreaming their issues and concerns in the overall framework and practice of social accountability. Interventions which consider these aspects have deeper potential to contribute to enhanced participation of marginalised groups. Therefore, the choice of services and issues to be monitored should be made in such a manner that it encourages the participation of women and other marginalised groups.
Social-accountability projects as policy experiments
In the Zimbabwean context, literature and feedback from study participants points to the short-term focus of citizen-driven accountability interventions where social accountability tends to be treated as a once-off event. As an alternative framework, social accountability projects are in fact best regarded as policy and practice experiments in a particular governance environment, where the major focus for interlocutors is on establishing core relationships that are required to deliver public goods. These relationships are essential in identifying game-changing actors and leveraging on these actors to drive change overtime. Such an approach makes sense considering that currently most social-accountability projects tend to be either too localised so that the evidence emerging from them has to be presented as a case study for policy in action, or they address only one aspect of a policy issue (for example, education for only girls), making it difficult to influence wholesale policy change.
From ‘accountability as responsiveness’ to ‘accountability as answerability’
In conceptualising the alternative social accountability framework, it is important to bring to the fore how ‘accountability’ can be understood and hence experienced differently in different contexts. Typically, what is called ‘accountability’ is actually understood as ‘accountability as responsiveness’ and not accountability as being answerable for performance against an agreed set of performance standards, or ‘accountability as answerability’. What would be of benefit is ensuring that social forms of accountability facilitate and inculcate a culture of answerability where solution holders justify and explain their actions and not merely emphasise responsiveness, through improved services, at the expense of being answerable to their constituents.