The elusive quest for the golden standard: Concepts, policies and practices of accountability in development cooperation
Renée Speijcken & Wieger Bakker
#2011-018
Promoting public accountability plays an ever increasing role in the
recent discourse on development cooperation. It is said to encourage a
more efficient use of public funds, to decrease corruption, add to more
legitimate, responsive and democratic institutions including government
and therefore to enhance aid effectiveness (OECD/DAC, 2005). To realize
these ideals, a wide range of stakeholders, from international
institutions, national governments to International Non-Governmental
Organisations (INGOs), unite in their elusive quest for the golden
standard to promote public accountability in their policies. More
accountability seems to have become the universal cure for all
democratic deficits and ineffective policies in developing countries.
However, in contrast to their high expectations, accountability
promotion policies have not yet delivered the expected results. This
paper seeks to understand why this has been the case by analysing the
current state of affairs of promoting public accountability in
development cooperation with a focus on donor interventions and
particularly on the interaction between donors' concepts, policies and
practices. We start by exploring how accountability gained importance in
development cooperation and what the underlying development paradigms,
ideologies and concepts were. A multilevel governance framework is
established in which four key interrelated accountability relationships
are identified and examined that characterize accountability in
development cooperation. The paper proceeds by exploring the main types
of donor practices in accountability promotion and discusses their
effects. It introduces a new perspective on assessing donor policies and
practices to understand the mismatch between expectations and result
from which conclusions and recommendations for future aid interventions
and for further research in the area of promoting public accountability
are formulated.
Keywords: public accountability, development cooperation, multi-level
governance, evidence based approaches