AUDITING AND ACCOUNTABILITY
HOW TO ADVANCE AUDITING AND ACCOUNTABILITY FOR THE CITIZENS AND THE FUTURE
I
n the development field in recent years, increasing attention has been given to understanding and promoting methods that enable relatively powerless people to hold more powerful people, organisations, and institutions to account. Many development practitioners see efforts towards this kind of accountability as having the potential to transform power relations in favour of the less powerful.
PHILLIP RAKGWALE
CISA, CIA, CFE, RGA, M.INST.D Chairperson of the Saiga Council
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Citizen Participation and Accountability
For those who look at issues of
Advancing Auditing &Accountability
governance and development from the perspective of citizens, it is both the right and the responsibility of citizens to participate in accounting for themselves and in holding other actors to account. If social exclusion and discrimination are to be reversed, governments and aid agencies need to be accountable to marginalised and excluded citizens. Involving such citizens in accountability initiatives calls for innovative and far-reaching participatory processes. In the words of a well-known scholar of accountability, Jonathan Fox, “If voice is about capacity for self-representation and self-expression, then power is
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