Accountability is a long word that can mean many different things depending on how it is used. Here at AAccountability, we use the word to talk about a specific process that holds people with power responsible for delivering on their commitments.
It’s important to say right up front that accountability is not one thing. It’s not one action, one approach, or one tool. It’s a process, a cycle, and given the ambitious nature of many commitments it’s work that will always be ongoing.
We live in complex times, facing complex problems, and it’s important to be able to approach these with complex solutions. The accountability framework presented here is a tool that helps us simplify the process in order to identify and take powerful actions that will matter. It holds space open for complexity but doesn’t get bogged down in it.
This framework is not original. It builds on the excellent work done by the WHO’s Global Tuberculosis Program, and it’s from this work that we’ll be drawing some of our examples today. We’d highly recommend anyone wanting to dig deeper to go read it for yourself, and we’ll be writing more on its origins in subsequent blog posts.
Let’s take a look at the various components that make up the accountability framework and unpack how they can be used.
Accountability starts with commitments, and at AAccountability we believe that there are no shortage of commitments already made that, if delivered on, would transform the world and make it a dramatically better place for everyone. At the top level these are the Sustainable Development Goals that all countries in the world have signed up to, and in addition at the individual country, region, and even city levels, important commitments have been made too.
Of course, commitments vary in quality. They can be vague or specific, time-bound or unhelpfully ‘someday’. One benchmark for checking the quality of commitments is to see if they have the elements contained in the SMART methodology, and if elements are missing then there is a good chance they need to be improved.
So good accountability work consists not just of using commitments to drive action, but also to continue to work to improve those commitments. If you care about, say, ensuring rural communities have access to healthcare, pushing decisionmakers to commit to exactly how many clinics, how many staff and specialists, delivering what services, to whom, by when, and paid for with what funds, becomes a key part of accountability work.
The ‘real work’ of delivery happens in this part of the framework. Very often, the people doing the work are not directly involved in many of the other processes in the accountability cycle, which, as we will see, is often a missed opportunity. In some cases, this is because their job specifically prohibits it - think of government or company employees who are limited in how they can lobby their employer. More often, the biggest barriers to those delivering activities to also delivering powerful accountability action are the time it takes and people underestimating their own power.
People who are busy implementing actions, particularly those working in important, mission-driven, and under-resourced areas, are often simply too busy to have the time and energy left over to take a bunch of accountability-related actions on top of their exhausting day job. This happens far too often, and it’s entirely understandable.
In addition, most people underestimate their own power. With over 7 billion of us on the planet, we receive so many messages that it’s difficult to change things and we can make very little difference as an individual. Evidence from looking at how change actually happens has shown us time and time again that this is simply untrue - a subject to unpack more in another article.
And yet those who are doing the work know more than anyone about how things are going, whether commitments are being met, whether nice sounding words are being implemented in practice, whether good-looking statistics are hiding terrible inequalities - and are powerful, credible voices.
What this means is that those of us who have the luxury of time and energy to focus more on accountability work risk losing out on a vast amount of knowledge, experience, and power if we cannot work in close partnership with those who are doing the work. We need to bring the time, energy, and tools to bear on supporting them to raise their voices. Building networks with individuals, organisations, and networks who are doing the work, and supporting them, is critical in being able to do good accountability.
Not to be confused with ‘review’, monitoring should be, in a word, boring. Boring, boring, boring. We collectively need to be investigating, counting, and reporting dispassionately about what is happening in the world in relation to commitments.
Without clear, identified, commonly agreed and respected ‘sources of truth’, accountability gets much harder because it becomes centred in opinion rather than fact and the remedy for challenging situations that aren’t going well can’t be based on evidence.
There is a strong temptation to bring review-type activities into monitoring. That is, to jump straight from quantifying the problem directly to proposing a solution. This can seem powerful, but it also risks opening the monitoring work up to accusations of bias or cherry picking. No study or monitoring work is ever unbiased, of course, but it can be particularly harmful if science becomes politicised. We need only look at the issue of climate change to see how politicising the science has damaged our ability to drive accountability.
So the very best monitoring should, almost always, be technical, expert, independent, non-political, and dare we say it again, boring.
When looking at accountability for a particular area, if there is no good monitoring going on then advocating for this to be put in place is an essential step, and well worth the investment in energy.
If monitoring should be boring, review is where accountability gets very exciting. Monitoring is primarily a technical process: review is primarily political.
Note that there is a big difference between small-p political - in the sense that these are processes that involve human beings solving our collective action problems through dialogue and debate, and big-P Political, which is the partisan party-political power-seeking behaviour that many people think of when they think of politics.
Review actions build on monitoring data and connect back to commitments, both to check progress against them and to push for improvements to them. They can be simple and personal, such as a letter written to a Minister or your local representative politician, or they can be loud and public, like a massive public march.
Review actions can be taken by all kinds of different actors, from private citizens, to civil society organisations, to networks, to independent bodies constituted at the national, regional, or international level - and more.
The actions that constitute review can vary widely and be described in a lot of different ways. One way that the actions of civil society organisations can be described is to place them on the activism-advocacy spectrum. Activism activities are usually positioned outside of traditional political power structures, and can be flashy, media friendly, emotionally provoking and powerful. A big street protest, for example. At the other end of this particular spectrum are advocacy activities: supporting the exact same objectives, advocacy often works more within existing political structures, with an insider voice, and doesn’t rely on stunts and media to get attention.
To be clear, the activism-advocacy spectrum is not the only way to think about this and doesn’t come close to capturing all the various ways of carrying out political review and holding leaders accountable. All kinds of accountability work are essential in driving change and there is no ‘best’ way. There are only ways that are more or less effective for given issues, for given decision makers, in given contexts, at given moments in time.
Good review work can be used to improve commitments, but its main function is to improve actions:often that is about better policies and more funding, with better implementation of both.
If you’re serious about achieving big things, then the accountability framework laid out here is a great place to start. AAccountability can of course help with every part of this framework, and we’d love to hear from you.