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Social Accountability and the Social Contract
be no more than associations of prominent individuals and their followers or ‘fan clubs.’” The absence of opposing ideology-based governing platforms has led to a situation in which the administrations of both parties avoid imposing negative impacts on organized labor and prefer indirect taxation for mobilizing domestic resources. As a result, the tax-to-GDP ratio is very low in Ghana, while economic rents from the extractive industry are an important source of government revenue. The highly visible and lucrative infrastructure projects are mostly financed through foreign (sovereign) loans, government bond issues, and public-private partnerships. Social tensions are heightened because of high unemployment and indebtedness. Inequality is increasing. Atta Mills (2018) concludes that Africa needs political parties that are more inclusive and reflect the socioeconomic aspirations of broad segments of the population. Despite the finding of Rothstein, Samanni, and Teorell (2012) that poor governments undermine trust in state institutions and thereby decrease popular support for state-sponsored redistribution, previously inactive socioeconomic groups need to find their voices and demand representation and reforms that can lead to reductions of both poverty and inequality. For the social contract to hold, elites should be made more accountable to their citizens—by protecting open media, promoting greater civic participation, and conducting regular performance audits.
Social Accountability and the Social Contract
The World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People (World Bank 2004) helped put social accountability into mainstream development practice by making citizen and civil society agency a critical factor in improving public policy and service delivery through accountable government. This effort has led to interest among practitioners and scholars alike in the relationship between social accountability and the social contract between citizens and the state. The creation in 2012 of the Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA)13 in the World Bank, for example, was inspired by a view of the Arab Spring as manifesting a citizenled critique of a failed social contract, and a desire for its renewal in which social accountability would be an important instrument for change.14 (See box 5.1.) Although this rationale was not informed by empirical study, it strongly suggested the potential utility of a social contract frame in understanding citizen-state relationships, aided by social accountability practice. In fact, immediately following the Arab Spring in 2011, the World Bank awarded a US$500,000 grant to support formation of the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in the Arab World, a regional network for advancing social accountability practice, as a signal of this move.15
BOX 5.1
“Two weeks ago, we convened a conference at the World Bank to listen to Arab voices—youth groups, women’s groups, change agents.
“What do they want? They want opportunity, justice, a job. They want rules and laws that are fair, predictable, and transparent. They want food and shelter for their families, good schools for their children, and neighborhoods that are safe. They want police forces that are protectors, not predators; they want governments that can be trusted. They want voice, and accountability—and they want it in villages, towns, and neighborhoods. They want a say over public services that have been so contorted so that they are neither open to the public nor offer real service. They want information and the right to know, and to participate.
“They want a new social contract [emphasis added]. They want dignity. They want respect. And if they are women, they want these same things.
“There are some in this audience who will say: Yes, that may be what they want, but that’s politics not economics. I am here to say: Some of that may be what we think of as politics, but most of it is also what we know is good economics; most of it is what we know is good for fighting corruption; most of it is what we know is good for inclusive and sustainable development.”
Source: Zoellick 2011.
Yet, above all, it is the progression in social accountability theory and practice since the World Development Report 2004 that makes it a potentially useful companion to the social contract framework. In the World Development Report 2004, social accountability is understood as an approach to public governance that involves citizens and civil society organizations (CSOs) in the management of public resources, in public decision-making and problem-solving, and in holding government accountable for its actions, including good-quality public service delivery (Bousquet et al. 2012). Today, “second-generation” social accountability theory and practice are closely aligned with the social contract framework presented in this report and its resonance with the notion of citizenstate bargaining in World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law. Social accountability theory has a clear strategic advantage in informing, supporting, or even evaluating social contracts. There are clear pointers in this report to the significance of social accountability to the social contract frame, including references to citizen-led accountability, that is, citizens’ capacity to hold the state to account for its commitments, and civil capacity associated with collective problem solving.
This relationship with social accountability is manifested in the following specific areas: • Collaborative social accountability counterbalances the Bank’s otherwise onesided relationship with governments. It mitigates the perception of the Bank as working only one side of the social contract. As an example, even as the
World Bank lends to the government of Ghana, a GPSA grant to the CSO
SEND Ghana supported CSO collaboration with the ministries of local government, education, and health, and supported CSO-facilitated monitoring and oversight of health and education budgets and services by local communities. • Collaborative social accountability can reinforce the three compasses this report argues are related to the cross-section of social contracts in Africa. First, the
GPSA’s collaborative model has the advantage of being embedded in the World Bank’s compacts with governments, which helps facilitate state responsiveness.16 Through diverse participatory mechanisms (social audits, community scorecards and citizen report cards, qualitative and quantitative surveys, participatory budgeting, tracking of citizen entitlements from the state, or facilitation of state-citizen interfaces and dialogues), social accountability processes work to make state provision of services respond meaningfully to citizen needs and preferences. Second, social accountability has direct implications for the second compass, imposing binding constraints on the citizen-state bargain, which depends on mapping and addressing civil and state capacities. The GPSA has validated the salience of these capacities with partners in Africa.17 Equipping and empowering societal and state actors with appropriate skills is also vital to managing expectations, mitigating grievances, and encouraging more effective public management that can strengthen the social contract.18 Third, social accountability can inform the third compass on social contract outcomes. From gender budgeting and participatory budgeting experiments across the regions to social audits and service-related scorecards, social accountability practice has been shown to support positive development outcomes. In Bangladesh, a GPSA-supported
CSO coalition collaborated with local governments (union parishads, or
UPs) and facilitated the participation of local communities in UPs’ plans and budgets. This enabled UPs to meet the requirements of the 2009 Local
Government Act for the statutory block grant allocation (which contained targets for inclusion of women’s priorities). • Collaborative social accountability, relational state-building, and state legitimacy. Most discussions on strengthening the social contract rely on an assumption that improved state-led service delivery to populations will automatically increase state legitimacy. An important feature of collaborative social accountability is its ability to make citizens’ experiences of the state
