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

Abstract

Democratic local governance (DLG), now a major subtheme within the overall context of democratic development, 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 sponsored by USAID (Bolivia, Honduras, India, Mali, the Philippines and Ukraine), this paper analyzes the two topics of participation and accountability, finding that both show significant potential for promoting DLG, though 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.

Introduction

As democratization generally has assumed a central role in the developing world over the past decade in both reality and international donor thinking, democratic decentralization has also taken on increased importance. Regimes have found themselves having to democratize at the local as well as at the national level, and donors have been attentive to supporting such initiatives. The major promise of democratic decentralization, or democratic local governance (DLG) as it will be called in this paper, is that by building popular participation and accountability into local governance, government at the local level will become more responsive to citizen desires and more effective in service delivery.

In this paper, I will endeavor to analyze the two themes of participation and accountability in DLG in the context of a six-country study sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) during 1996-97. The central findings show both aspects exhibiting significant potential for promoting DLG, though 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 appears at first glance. Finally, I will bring both aspects together to present a picture of their centrality to the general process of DLG.

Democratic local governance as it is employed in this paper combines the devolutionary form of decentralization (in which real authority and responsibility are transferred to local bodies) with democracy at the local level.¹ Accordingly, it can be defined as meaningful authority devolved to local units of governance that are accessible and accountable to the local citizenry, who enjoy full political rights and liberty. It thus differs from the vast majority of earlier efforts at decentralization in developing areas, which go back to the 1950s, and which were largely initiatives in public administration without any serious democratic component.²

This new mode of support for decentralization emerged in the later 1980s, in the wake of the democratization wave that swept so many countries toward the end of that decade and that inspired both aid-recipient governments and donors to support democracy at local as well as at the national level. By the mid-1990s, USAID was supporting about 60 DLG activities around the world, and other donors were quite active in the field as well, most notably the United Nations Development Programme, which during the course of the 1990s has assisted over 250 decentralization activities in various countries. Perhaps the most impressive testimonial to the perceived efficacy of DLG has been its endorsement by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC, which consists of all the principal bilateral donors) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in its 1997 official report on “Participatory Development and Good Governance” (OECD, 1997, espectully. I-11). At the decade’s end, DLG constitutes a major item in the assistance portfolio of most donors, and as such it deserves an analysis of its efficacy as a development strategy.

DLG comprises a number of aspects in addition to participation and accountability—performance in service delivery, resource allocation and mobilization, and degree of power devolution are among the most important ones. But what makes DLG different from earlier forms of decentralization is the inclusion of these two new themes. The central idea of participation is to give citizens a meaningful role in local government decisions that affect them, while accountability means that people will be able to hold local government responsible for how it is affecting them. Together, these two processes are what constitute the heart of the “democratic” component of democratic local governance.

DLG has been advocated for what it is (or ought to be) and for what it does (or what it should do), i.e., as a process or end-in-itself and as a means to further ends, in this case the outputs of DLG. On the process side, through participation DLG promises to increase popular input into what local government does, and through accountability it bids to increase popular control over what local government has done or left undone. On the output side, DLG finds its justification largely in the ideas that it can improve local service delivery and that for a good number of donors it can contribute significantly to poverty reduction as well.³ In this paper, I will concentrate on the two process themes of participation and accountability, while taking some issue with assertions about poverty alleviation.

During 1996–97, USAID’s Center for Development Information and Evaluation (CDIE) undertook an assessment of DLG in six countries with ongoing programs. The primary aim was to distill from the experience of the last decade what USAID in particular and the international development community more generally had learned about DLG and how such knowledge might inform future donor initiatives supporting DLG.⁴ The sample was chosen to include a variety of regions as well as a range of conditions in which DLG initiatives had been launched. In addition, given the rather unhappy track record of earlier administrative efforts at decentralization over previous decades, there was a strong incentive to find current initiatives that showed some prospect of succeeding, so countries were chosen to include good cases rather than bad ones.

The sample, in short, was purposeful and illustrative, not scientific or inclusive. It included two cases in Latin America (Bolivia and Honduras), two in Asia (India and the Philippines), and one each in Eastern Europe (Ukraine) and Africa (Mali). All six countries were essentially democratic at the national level at the time of the USAID assessment. Except for India, all the other countries had ongoing USAID-assisted DLG initiatives under way by the mid-1990s (although Mali’s effort will be fully implemented only in 1999). None of these five had begun before the 1990s, however, and it seemed worthwhile to include at least one system with a longer history in DLG. India had begun its efforts in this sector in 1959 with its Panchayati Raj program, which with occasional interruptions had continued into the 1990s. So although there had been no American assistance to Panchayati Raj for more than 25 years, the Indian state of Karnataka, which was reputed to have one of the most effective DLG programs in the country, was selected for inclusion in the study.⁵

Assessment teams from USAID in Washington studied DLG in the five independent countries, spending about three weeks in each one. Methodology consisted largely of key informant interviews, document review, and field visits to a sample of local government units in each country. The country studies were then written and published as separate reports.⁶ All six studies were comparatively analyzed in a synthesis report, which emphasized several aspects of DLG; the present paper draws in significant part on this report but attempts a deeper analysis of the participation and accountability themes.⁷