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Social accountability and water integrity: Learning from experiences with participatory and transparent budgeting in Ethiopia and Nepal

Experiences with social accountability measures in water management schemes in Nepal and Ethiopia offer useful lessons for practitioners. Participation and transparency in budgeting measures open up new spaces for deliberation, raise awareness of rights, and encourage calling service providers to account. Donors should recognise and appreciate this development of deliberative capacities and trust building as a worthwhile goal in itself. It is also an important precondition for strengthening the links between transparency, accountability, participation, and anti-corruption.

11 September 2019
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Social accountability and water integrity:  Learning from experiences with participatory and transparent budgeting in Ethiopia and Nepal

Main points

  • Consolidate the links between transparency, accountability, participation and anti-corruption (TAPA) to improve water integrity. One cannot take a direct and effective relationship between TAPA for granted. It is necessary to continuously examine and consolidate the links between these principles in order to make them effective.
  • Appreciate deliberative capital and trust building as major outcomes. Even if they are not easy to measure, building deliberative capital (the capacity to become an outspoken critic) and trust building are important outcomes of social accountability programmes. They are preconditions for devolving power from funding agencies and governments to communities so that the communities can become critics, watchdogs, and equal partners.
  • Promoting a social accountability culture creates and requires new roles, relationships, and responsibilities between all stakeholders – this takes time! Local interpretations of accountability do not always match textbook approaches, but they can often be functional in their own way. Thus, a learning approach to local people’s expectations of justice and accountability is important to define which tools are the most appropriate.

Cite this publication


Otto, B.; Clement, F.; Das, B.; Dhungana, H.; Feuerstein, L.; Senbeta, G.; Van Driel, J. (2019) Social accountability and water integrity: Learning from experiences with participatory and transparent budgeting in Ethiopia and Nepal. Bergen: U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, Chr. Michelsen Institute (U4 Issue 2019:11)

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Birke Otto
Floriane Clement
Binayak Das
Hari Dhungana
Lotte Feuerstein
Girma Senbeta
Jasmina Van Driel

Disclaimer


All views in this text are the author(s)’, and may differ from the U4 partner agencies’ policies.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)