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Evaluation of Citizens' Voice and Accountability: Review of the Literature and Donor Approaches

Author: T O Neil and M Foresti
Date: 2007
Size: 78 pages (1.23 MB)

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Summary

How can the effectiveness of voice and accountability (V&A) interventions be assessed? This paper from the Department for International Development (DFID) reviews the strategy and policy documents of seven DAC donors in order to contribute to the design of a V&A evaluation framework. Donors need to give higher priority to evaluation research and the development of performance measures to generate more systematic evidence about the effectiveness of their activities.

Enhancing citizen voice and accountability has become increasingly important for donors since the 1990s and will remain part of donor strategies for the foreseeable future. However, donors have not yet fully grappled with their understanding of the underlying causes of poor governance in different countries or with different trajectories of change. There has been little progress with establishing frameworks that relate voice and accountability to context.

Current approaches do not consider whether voice and accountability have the same meaning in different systems, or whether the strategy for promoting them should be different.
There is limited articulation of the causes (rather than symptoms) of poor governance in different types of countries and of how societies and states are transformed.
The collective knowledge of donors has much more to say about the types of approach that they should be adopting than about the effectiveness of current models, particularly in terms of broader development outcomes.

There is no ‘golden rule’ as to what constitutes an ideal approach for evaluating voice and accountability – donors can experiment with different methods and approaches.

Theory-based approaches to evaluation can contribute to a better understanding of the causal/impact chains linking activities, outputs and results.
Theory-based approaches to evaluation can also solve some of the problems associated with results-based evaluation given difficulties of attribution and measurement.
A framework to evaluate voice and accountability interventions should adopt an iterative approach and be realistic about what it can and cannot include. It should be possible to identify the logics which underpin the various interventions.
The sustainability and effectiveness of many interventions is dependent on adopting a long-term perspective in order to influence broader development outcomes.
Evaluation models are important for understanding the operation of voice and accountability and their relationship to broader social and political processes of change. The fit between evaluation models and their actual functioning should be determined by context.
Frameworks or typologies for understanding context can help reconcile the context-specific nature of social and political processes and the need for programming to be grounded in models.
Frameworks developed by civil society organisations include features that could also be useful for a framework to evaluate voice and accountability.

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Source: O'Neill, T., Foresti, M. and Hudson, A., 2007, 'Evaluation of Citizens' Voice and Accountability: Review of the Literature and Donor Approaches', Department for International Development, London
Author: Marta Foresti , m.foresti@odi.org.uk
Overseas Development Institute (ODI), http://www.odi.org.uk/