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Key Text Rude Accountability in the Unreformed State: Informal Pressures on Frontline Bureaucrats in Bangladesh

Author: Naomi Hossain
Date: 2009
Size: 37 pages (209 KB)

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Summary

How successful are the informal pressures that poor citizens exert on officials to provide services in Bangladesh? This paper from the Institute of Development Studies examines how poor people experience safety nets, schools and health services. Local political and social pressures provide responsiveness to demands for service through shame and the threat of violence. The gains from ‘rude’ accountability are often short-lived, however, and may backfire. It is important to bridge the informal and official mechanisms of accountability.

The expansion of social service provision in the 1990s has meant the Bangladeshi state is now a larger presence in the lives of poor citizens. But the terms of its interaction with those citizens remain largely unreformed, more strongly marked by the culture of patronage and deference than by any common ground on rights and responsibilities. ‘Rude’ forms of accountability are central to how poor people negotiate their entitlements to services in Bangladesh.

Poor people have good reasons to use these methods in preference to formal accountability mechanisms. Effective formal systems for accountability are absent and the state remains unreformed in key respects. Poor women may have a particularly strong comparative advantage in using informal methods because it is comparatively less difficult for them to do so than to engage in more formally structured means of complaint or feedback.

Given that the state seems unable to enforce administrative sanctions against failing officials, shame and embarrassment and the loss of political face may be reasonable stop-gap measures. There are features of contemporary Bangladeshi state-society relations that lend themselves to informal means of accountability. Other findings are that:

There is an appetite and a capacity to monitor frontline service provision on the part of poor citizens.
‘Soft’ social sanctions on public officials who fail in their duties do have some effect.
There is a surprising lack of organised civil society action behind these rude encounters between state and society.
The big service-providing NGOs have been hesitant about confrontation with frontline officials because they depend on them to sustain their operations at the local level.
The appetite for critical activism around public social service delivery may also be diminished by the fact that NGOs rely on government financing for public-private partnerships.
Although little social accountability has been achieved, there is a strong sense of entitlement, which is probably connected with NGO programmes of group mobilisation and capacity building.

Rude accountability matters because it highlights how relationships of accountability in service delivery are embedded in social relations and political pressures that are unofficial, informal, and personalised. Implications include the following:

When accountability systems fail, it is important to understand which particular informal pressures are operating and to learn how poor citizens attempt to claim their entitlements.
It is important to bridge the informal and official mechanisms of accountability, so that the power and accessibility of the informal can be connected to the sanctions, rules and neutrality of official mechanisms.
The prevalence of ‘rude’ forms of accountability cannot be celebrated as the spontaneous flowering of rights discourses and people-power in poor countries.

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Source: Hossain N., 2009, 'Rude Accountability in the Unreformed State: Informal Pressures on Frontline Bureaucrats in Bangladesh', Institute of Development Studies, Brighton
Author: Naomi Hossain , N.Hossain[at]ids.ac.uk
Organisation: Institute of Development Studies , http://www.ids.ac.uk