Rethinking Social Accountability in Africa: Lessons from the Mwananchi Programme

This 132-page report draws on five years of lessons learned and case studies from implementing the Mwananchi Governance and Transparency Programme in six African countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Zambia. The report proposes a focus on context-specific processes, or 'interlocution processes', by which selected actors, or interlocutors, can orchestrate changes in citizen-state relations at various levels and a retreat from standardised tools which fail to produce the right results in different contexts. According to the report, media can play a key role as an interlocutor, but that processes themselves are at the centre of social accountability, rather than organisations or institutions.

The five-year Mwananchi Programme, funded by United Kingdom Department for International Development and led by Overseas Development Institute (ODI), focused on specific governance issues in each county. The Mwananchi Programme sought to provide a dynamic platform that can give citizens a voice in enabling the state to be responsive, accountable, and capable of delivering public services to poor people. Cross-cutting activities included a participatory governance grant scheme for CSOs, media organisations, and elected officials; promoting constructive dialogue and negotiation among interlocutors and state actors; providing capacity development support for project grantees; and creating a platform to reflect on practical actions through on-going research into good governance when working with CSOs, the media, and elected representatives.

According to the report, three key lessons emerged from the programme’s deep engagement with social accountability:

• there is a need to improve understanding and analysis of conflicting incentives;
• programmes must embrace and utilise contextual dynamics; and
• frameworks that identify and involve game-changing actors, or "interlocutors" must be used.

The report notes that collective-action theory shows that every citizen or actor is embedded in a complex web of interests and incentives, arising from their closest relationships through to far external influences. In some contexts, such as this project, these incentives may suddenly spur the actor to action, often in unexpected ways: to recruit others; to withdraw their involvement; to myriad ways of acting and interacting, which can lead to less than desirable results. ‘Interlocution’ is the process of addressing this complex web of incentives and actions through actors selected for their game-changing abilities.

Many social accountability programmes focus on initiatives to "amplify the voices of citizens and enable governments to listen and respond effectively, with the goal of creating more effective democratic governance and accountability." The argument is that when citizen feedback at the point of delivery is given room and attention, the impact is also most direct, because actions from the respective governments and the donors that support them will be quicker and more relevant. One of the main assumptions being made is that when citizens face a common problem (for example, failure to get water because of a broken water-pipe system) they will naturally work towards the common interest of ‘holding government to account’. However, the mere presence of a common problem does not determine the behaviour of the actors involved. It only provides an opportunity for collective action to happen.

The Mwananchi theory of change began with the assumption that working with civil society, media, elected representatives (councillors and members of parliament) and traditional leaders can strengthen citizen demand for good governance. It was thought that it is these organisations that mostly work on citizen empowerment, articulate citizen voices, provide channels into policy for these voices, mobilise identified citizen strategies, and work on exacting state accountability. This theory assumed that all the four interlocutors (media, CSOs, traditional leaders, and elected representatives) have very distinct institutional roles. The issue however is that they often do not understand these roles well, which undermines their specific advantages and contribution to governance contexts.

This programme process led to a refocusing of the theory of change from interlocutors as organisations to interlocution as a process. It was observed that the roles of the actors, and the results that were emerging (in terms of voice and accountability) from projects, were elevating the role or form of actors above their functions. In other words, success was often attributed to implementing organisations when in fact the important change-factor was the organisation's behaviour, or some other special ingredient that, when in action, helped change happen. It is the process of changing the ‘rules of the game’ (involving the changing of incentive structures of various actors) towards maximising actor inputs, in order to address or find solutions to their collective-action challenge or problem, that the programme refers to as ‘interlocution’.

Based on experience with the Mwananchi programme, the report states that each situation demands particular change processes, and these processes can go beyond resolving the problem itself to addressing the incentive structures, rules, and structural influences from the wider environment, such as government policies or the allocation of aid. This new focus starts with the cultivation of trust-based relationships among the actors involved; then the recruitment of contributions to help the process (such as ideas, resources and other kinds of influence), always bearing in mind that these contributors will also have self-serving incentives and interests. This point – the need to focus the intervention on context-specific interlocution processes – by extension shows us the crucial need to find and support the right interlocutors of change in order to enhance citizen engagement as a mechanism for strengthening citizen-state accountability relationships.

Adopting this approach will have implications on how social-accountability projects are designed and implemented in various contexts. It means a new way of thinking:

• treating social-accountability projects as policy experiments: showing what a good policy would look like and how it could be implemented effectively, and investing in this process;
• social accountability as learning to build trust-based relationships: allowing local realities and relationships, rather than imported social-accountability tools, to be the primary drivers of change;
• a level playing-field for marginalised citizens: promoting rules that provide political leverage either directly to the poor or to elite interests in such a way that there is benefit for both them and the poor;
• gradual movement from ‘accountability as responsiveness’ to ‘accountability as answerability’: the application of sanctions formed by actors in a relationship of trust during the process of solving the collective-action problem, with appropriate measures for mitigating risks.

The report concludes that the social-accountability approach discussed in this paper opens up a space for actors that possess the necessary game-changing (‘interlocution’) characteristics, to help ordinary citizens engage in a state-citizen relationship, and to be recognised for the contribution
that they are making.