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Key Text Participation and Accountability at the Periphery: Democratic Local Governance in Six Countries

Author: H Blair
Date: 2000
Size: 18 pages

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Summary

As democratisation has assumed a central role in the developing world over the past decade, democratic decentralisation has also taken on increased importance and donors have been attentive to supporting such initiatives. Democratic local governance (DLG) promises that government at the local level can become more responsive to citizen desires and more effective in service delivery. Based on a six-country study (Bolivia, Honduras, India, Mali, the Philippines and Ukraine) this paper in World Development analyses the two topics of participation and accountability.

DLG comprises a number of aspects in addition to participation and accountability – performance in service delivery, resource allocation and mobilisation and degree of power devolution are among the most important. The paper finds that both participation and accountability show significant potential for promoting DLG although there seem to be important limitations on how much participation can actually deliver and accountability covers a much wider range of activity and larger scope for DLG strategy than initially appears.

The study finds that:

DLG initiatives have encouraged participation and increased representation but have provided little in the way of empowerment and even less in making the distribution of benefits more equitable or reducing poverty.
However increased representation offers significant benefits in itself such as demonstrating to children of both genders and ethnic communities that they can aspire to public service.
Although DLG offers only limited scope for poverty alleviation it can be helpful in promoting more universalistic local development activities that will benefit the weak and vulnerable along with everyone else.
A wide range of accountability mechanisms is available. However any one or two of these mechanisms, even if operating effectively, seems unlikely to promise sustainable accountability.

This analysis presents several implications for implementing a DLG strategy:

Given sufficient political will on the part of the central government to keep a decentralisation initiative in place over time, effective DLG can be achieved in a number of ways.
Many of theses approaches will take a long time before they function properly and indeed may never fully do so. In some cases however it may be possible to devise a mix of instruments to make up for those that are unlikely to work.
There is no apparent sequencing of appropriate mechanisms. Some kind of formula would be useful to elaborate the first steps for donors supporting DLG. However the diversity in contexts may prohibit this.
Local elites may be even less likely than national elites to target government resources to the poor.
The benefits of increased representation will take some time to unfold and people new to making public decisions will have a fairly long learning curve before they can shape local public policy to benefit their constituencies.

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Source: Blair, H., 2000, 'Participation and accountability at the periphery: democratic local governance in six countries', World Development,vol. 28, no. 1, pp.21-39.
Author: U.S. Agency for International Development, http://www.usaid.gov