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11. Educational Accountability or Social Accountability in Education? Similarities, Tensions, and Differences

Author:
Felipe J. Hevia and Samana Vergara-Lope
Publication Date:
11-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Accountability Research Center (ARC), American University
Abstract:
This article addresses the relationship between the concepts of Social Accountability and Educational Accountability. The analysis of the similarities, differences and tensions between these two different concepts can strengthen citizen participation for educational improvement by identifying the full range of actors and processes in decision making that influence the success or failure of educational policy beyond of the teachers. We encounter two distinctive features involving social accountability mechanisms in the field of education: (1) There are many actors who participate in education, making it difficult to identify precisely who is responsible for key decisions, and (2) In education policy one encounters the concept of educational accountability, which refers to a series of mechanisms to hold schools and teachers accountable for educational outcomes by adopting standardized tests on a widespread basis to motivate change and steady improvement. Are the approaches of social accountability and educational accountability compatible? What are their differences and similarities? What are the effects of these differences when it comes to formulating solutions to the crisis in education? Through a comparative analysis, and looking at the Mexican case in depth, it becomes clear that we have to examine more than the tip of the iceberg. The educational accountability perspective is insufficient and at times counterproductive for educational improvement because it has a series of biases that are centered on the symptoms more than the causes of the structural problems related to low education levels. These biases include (1) Reducing the criteria for assessing the success of education policies to the outcomes of standardized tests, (2) Identifying teachers as the main actors responsible for educational outcomes, without considering other associated factors, such as student characteristics and socio-economic factors, (3) The concentration of negative consequences in the last chain of interaction—teachers and schools—which disproportionately affects students and teachers, and (4) Difficulties in mobilizing citizens around the demand for a better education. The school and the teachers are the main providers of educational services, but their performance is not the only cause of educational outcomes. This is why we need to construct an expanded vision of social accountability in education, based on a human rights perspective all of the actors assume our responsibility inside and outside the schools, to facilitate: (1) The generation of broad and fair criteria of success for evaluating education policy, using various evaluation methodologies and the results to generate formative feedback; (2) To better identify those responsible and their responsibilities, focusing on those factors that improve equity and quality, increase students’ motivation to learn, reduce the burden of the socioeconomic inequalities, and help produce more supportive schools and teachers, and (3) The involvement of citizens to achieve better learning, build relationships based on mutual trust, and complement access to local information with policy monitoring throughout the chain of decision-making.
Topic:
Education, Human Rights, Accountability, Equity, and Community Engagement
Political Geography:
Global Focus

12. How a Community-Led Response to Sexual Exploitation in Uganda Led to Systemic World Bank Reform

Author:
Elana Berger
Publication Date:
06-2018
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Accountability Research Center (ARC), American University
Abstract:
How can demands for accountability and redress for harm suffered in a particular case contribute to new institutional measures to prevent future abuse? This note describes how the small Ugandan community of Bigodi, together with local, national, and international allies, mobilized to demand redress for harm done by a World Bank-funded infrastructure project, and in doing so, catalyzed changes at the World Bank aimed at preventing similar abuses in the future. The Bigodi community’s 2015 request to the World Bank’s Inspection Panel, bolstered by international media coverage, led Bank management to respond both to the specific harms and to the underlying policy failures that made them possible. The community called for the World Bank to address cases of sexual exploitation of teenage girls by construction workers employed by a Bank-funded project, the Uganda Transport Sector Development Project (TSDP). This case is significant not only because World Bank funding for the project was cancelled, affected community members received needed support services, and a corrupt government agency was purged, but because the institutional changes made may prevent similar harms across future World Bank projects. The World Bank promotes a discourse of accountability, and yet obtaining redress when problems result from World Bank projects is difficult. This is often because, rather than treating requests from communities to the Inspection Panel as an opportunity to learn lessons and improve development outcomes, World Bank management generally responds defensively and treats the Panel investigation as an adversarial process in which they seek to prove the requestors wrong. As this case demonstrates, however, when management responds constructively to Panel investigations, genuine reform can take place. For this to happen, pressure from outside the Bank is needed to provide reformers within the Bank with the opportunity to make needed policy changes both at the project level and Bank-wide. The factors that led the Bank to respond constructively with a comprehensive response in the TSDP case included: – a strong community–NGO partnership which pursued justice for victims of sexual exploitation and abuse – sustained advocacy from national and international civil society – high-profile media attention on a topic that caused embarrassment for the Bank – a strong report from an independent accountability mechanism within the World Bank (the Inspection Panel) – pressure from the Bank’s Board of Directors, in particular frequent engagement from the US government with all levels of Bank management – high-level individuals within the Bank, including President Kim, were committed to making policy changes that would reduce the risk of gender-based violence in the future. This case embodies the potential for specific instances of harm to provide the necessary catalyst for improved accountability structures and system-wide change.
Topic:
Civil Society, World Bank, Reform, Sexual Violence, Accountability, Exploitation, and Community Engagement
Political Geography:
Uganda and Africa

13. Learning to Sustain Change: Mitanin Community Health Workers Promote Public Accountability in India

Author:
Samir Garg and Suchi Pande
Publication Date:
08-2018
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Accountability Research Center (ARC), American University
Abstract:
Can community health workers (CHWs) act as agents of change in enhancing the public accountability of government, despite being state-funded actors themselves? CHW programs worldwide face challenges in achieving public accountability. They face a tension between upward accountability (to higher officials within the health system) and public accountability (to the people who access and use public health services), especially with respect to their potential to play a role as agents of public accountability (Schaaf et al. 2018). This Accountability Note illustrates how the CHW program of the Chhattisgarh state government in central India— known as Mitanin—has, over time, developed a learning strategy that permits CHWs (Mitanins) to enable sustained action on public accountability, whilst simultaneously providing health services and education, and linking communities with government healthcare services. The main proposition of this note is that this evolving learning strategy enabled state and civil society actors to design institutions and processes appropriate for accountability. Our focus is on understanding how learning has lent the program the ability to evolve ways for continuously managing the essential tensions inherent in its design, and how this has been key to developing sustainable accountability strategies. We discuss examples of how the Mitanins’ evolving learning strategy has contributed to their efforts to ensure public accountability of the health system to people who use public health services. These examples are grouped under five propositions about the roles CHWs can play in sustainable public accountability: 1. Community health workers can simultaneously act as service providers and agents of public accountability. 2. Community health workers can set agendas for advocacy on issues of accountability by building virtuous cycles of action and learning. 3. Community health workers can build countervailing power at multiple levels. 4. Community health workers can demand both rights for communities, and better working conditions for themselves. 5. ‘Action-strategists’ can create an appropriate state-civil society organization to facilitate community health workers’ action. This note offers insights from the Mitanin experience on these five ways that CHWs can build and sustain accountability, and illustrates how the program has taken a movement-building approach to public health, and thus avoided becoming a narrow technocratic intervention.
Topic:
Civil Society, Health, Accountability, Public Health, and Community Engagement
Political Geography:
South Asia and India

14. From the Ground Up: Multi-Level Accountability Politics in Land Reform in the Philippines

Author:
Francis Isaac, Danilo Carranza, and Joy Aceron
Publication Date:
12-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Accountability Research Center (ARC), American University
Abstract:
In 1988, the Philippines enacted a land redistribution policy known as the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP). After almost three decades of implementation, an estimated 13 percent of the land targeted for redistribution remains in the hands of powerful landlords. This paper investigates the contestation involved in the implementation of agrarian reform through the lens of multi-level accountability politics. The Philippines’ longstanding campaign for agrarian reform has been led mainly by peasant organizations with deep links to the democracy movement. Following the transition from martial law to electoral politics in 1986, a broad coalition was able to secure the legislation of meaningful agrarian reform. Yet landlord power and impunity have managed to slow reform implementation. For decades, the peasant movement has struggled to push the government to implement its own laws, which involves direct conflict with landlords and their allies in government. In contrast to much of the research literature on accountability initiatives, which focuses on public goods and service provision, this study addresses the more openly contested process of implementing redistributive reform. The case of the Peasant Movement of Bondoc Peninsula (Kilusang Magbubukid ng Bondoc Peninsula, KMBP) sheds light on the contest over implementing land reform in the Philippines. This study narrates the struggle of KMBP through the lens of vertical integration—how campaigns target different levels of governance (village, municipality, national, etc.) to achieve meaningful change. Using vertical integration, the paper uses a new mapping tool to identify the wide variety of actions taken by KMBP and its partners, the level of governance they have targeted, and the level of intensity in which they were pursued. The Bondoc peasant movement worked to persuade the government to carry out its own land reform commitments, leading to the transfer of 10,000 hectares of land from some of the biggest landlords in the area to 3,800 tillers. This study shows how peasant organizations built their campaign from the ground up, starting around particular villages and landholdings and then building coalitions operating at the municipal, district, and national levels. This has allowed peasants to exert pressure on different levels of government, at times aided by national-level civil society organizations and media coverage. In a novel approach, the paper also maps the similarly vertically integrated efforts of anti-accountability forces— those with a vested interest in blocking reform. Owners of large landholdings have responded with harassment, physical violence, vote buying and political maneuvering to undermine reform implementation. The conventional approach to the study of accountability initiatives either leaves out the opposition or treats it as a mere residual category. The approach developed here, by analyzing the opposition through a multi-level lens, brings the anti-accountability forces and their strategies into the framework. This mapping of anti-accountability forces reveals their power to be also vertically integrated. Landlord resistance to policy implementation has been especially intense at the village and municipal levels, but they have also undertaken lobbying at the national level. Their coalition-building strategy even includes unlikely alliances with Maoist rebels, when their interests align. In addition to spotlighting the central role of peasant mobilization in promoting redistributive policy implementation, this paper’s broader takeaway emphasizes the relevance of analyzing accountability initiatives through mapping the varied repertoires of both pro- and anti-accountability forces.
Topic:
Politics, Accountability, Mobilization, Land Reform, and Community Engagement
Political Geography:
Philippines and Asia-Pacific