Social accountability sourcebook - chapter 4: Social accountability and local governments
2006
The World Bank
This chapter is about social accountability and local governments. The main objective is to illustrate, through case examples, the most common strategies that citizens employ to hold local governments accountable for the fulfillment of their public duties and for their performance, besides voting with ballots or “with their feet.”
Of the three main types of decentralization, this chapter focuses on devolution to local governments, the transfer of authority for decision making, finance, and management to quasi-autonomous units of local government. Devolution provides the most enabling context for citizens’ demands for accountability to have an impact on government performance. While the other two forms of decentralization, deconcentration and delegation, transfer some authority to lower levels of government, the incentives of the latter are for upward rather than downward accountability.
Keywords: local governments
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