Question

What are the ways to ensure accountability of civil servants? How does accountability help in reducing corruption?

Answer 1

In its democratic political aspect, decentralization as currently conceived and increasingly practiced in the international development community has two principal components: participation and accountability. Participation is chiefly concerned with increasing the role of citizens in choosing their local leaders and in telling those leaders what to do—in other words, providing inputs into local governance. Accountability constitutes the other side of the process; it is the degree to which local governments have to explain or justify what they have done or failed to do. Improved information about local needs and preferences is one of the theoretical advantages of decentralization, but there is no guarantee that leaders will actually act on these preferences unless they feel some sort of accountability to citizens. Local elections are the most common and powerful form of accountability, but other mechanisms such as citizen councils can have limited influence.

Accountability can be seen as the validation of participation, in that the test of whether attempts to increase participation prove successful is the extent to which people can use participation to hold a local government responsible for its actions.

Types of Accountability

Accountability comes in two dimensions: that of government workers to elected officials; and that of the latter to the citizens who elect them.

Government Workers to Local Officials

The first type can prove difficult to achieve, for civil servants, particularly professionals in such fields as health, education, agriculture --the very sectors that are most often decentralized-- often have considerable incentive to evade control by locally elected officials. Such people generally have university training and sophisticated life-style practices hard to maintain in small towns and villages, career ambitions that transcend the local level, and goals for their children’s education that local schools cannot meet. They may well also fear that quality standards for service delivery will suffer if provision is localized. Finally, they often find opportunities for corruption greater if they are supervised by distant managers through long chains of command than if they must report to superiors close at hand. For all these reasons, they tend to have strong urges to maintain ties with their parent ministries in the central government and to resist decentralization initiatives. And understandably, their colleagues at the center have a parallel interest in maintaining these ties, for they are much concerned about preserving national standards in service delivery and often about opportunities for venality as well (many corruption schemes provide for sharing ill-gotten gains upward through bureaucratic channels to the top).

Given all these reasons both good and bad for opposition, it is scarcely surprising that decentralization initiatives so often run into heavy bureaucratic resistance, and designers find themselves pressured to keep significant linkages between the field and the central ministries, especially concerning such issues as postings, promotions, and salaries. Needless to say, such ties tend to undercut the capacity of elected officials to supervise government servants supposedly working for them. Some decentralized governance systems (e.g., Karnataka State in India) appear to have worked through these problems to establish popular control over the bureaucracy, but it has taken many years to do so.

Elected Leaders to the Citizenry

The second type of accountability is that of elected officials to the citizenry. Elections (provided they are free and fair) provide the most obvious accountability, but this is a rather blunt tool, exercised only at widespread intervals and offering only the broadest citizen control over government. Voters can retain or reject their governors, a decision that can certainly have salutary effects on governance, but these acts are summary judgments, generally not reactions to particular acts or omissions. And when local elections do revolve around a given issue, such as schools, they necessarily leave everything else out of the picture. Citizens need more discriminating instruments to enforce accountability. Fortunately, a number of these are available.

Political parties can be a powerful tool for accountability when they are established and vigorous at the local level, as in many Latin American countries. They have a built-in incentive to uncover and publicize wrongdoing by the party in power and to present continuously an alternative set of public policies to the voters.

Civil society and its precursor social capital enable citizens to articulate their reaction to local government and to lobby officials to be responsive. These representations generally come through NGOs (though spontaneous protests can also be considered civil society), which, like political parties, often have parent organizations at the provincial or national level.

If citizens