Five Worlds for Transparency and Accountability

This blog was written by Stephen Kosack (UW) and Archon Fung (HKS) and originally published for the Transparency and Accountability Initiative in June 2013.

How can providing information lead to more accountable and effective governance? In a previous post we discussed two possibilities: the confrontational approach, in which information empowers citizens and communities to prevent public officials from misbehaving; and the collaborative approach, in which information allows communities and officials to work together, solving problems to make government and its services work better.

This is a complicated choice, but it is hardly the only one involved in designing effective transparency and accountability programs. Another, equally important choice is whether to target public officials at the local level or at higher levels of government (such as provincial or national levels). That is, the frontline providers of government goods and services or the policymakers and politicians who oversee them.

This choice is one with which the field of transparency and accountability has grappled for more than a decade. It is at the root of one of the field’s most influential frameworks: the “long” and “short” routes of accountability in the World Bank’s 2004 World Development Report on Making Services Work for Poor People. In the short route, citizens engage directly with those who provide public services, to press for the improvement of those services. In the long route, citizens use their political power — voting or advocacy, for example — to press policymakers and politicians to use their positions of oversight to make government services more efficient and effective.

Furthermore, to be effective transparency policies must provide information that meets a number of criteria. It must be: salient and valuable to citizens — users of government services or those in the civil society who want to improve their lives — and useful to those citizens, in that it helps change their behavior or decisions in ways that trigger improvements in governance. But triggering those improvements also requires action by the disclosers or objects of the information: they must be sensitive to the information, so that they are affected by its disclosure; and the disclosure of the information must lead them to improve their performance rather than resist or strategically game disclosures to obscure any underperformance. (These criteria are explored in greater depth in Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency, by Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil.)

Long route or short route; confrontation or collaboration?

We propose that one key to answering this question lies in the political-economic context within which a transparency program unfolds. Often the word “context” is used to indicate the difficulty of understanding a mechanism or generalizing a result. But we have in mind something quite specific: those features of the political economy that make information effective through different mechanisms. We offer a basic, if perhaps simplified, typology of five such contexts — five “worlds” of transparency and accountability.

In many ways, the easiest context is that in which citizens have an exit option. When parents or patients can choose between more than one clinic or school, competition creates a kind of short route accountability in which users can vote with their feet, using the information provided through transparency to switch to higher performing providers.

But the transparency and accountability community generally deals with environments in which there is only one provider. This is when choices between long and short routes and collaboration and confrontation become necessary. The choice involves assessing the individual providers, policymakers, and politicians, each of whom vary in their willingness to respond constructively to information about underperformance, and the incentives and constraints of the political environment in which these individuals are embedded. Depending on these features of the environment, designers of T/A programs may be operating in one of five worlds. Each implies a different mechanism by which transparency might improve the efficiency and effectiveness of public services.

In each world, the mechanism by which transparency improves accountability and ultimately public services is different:

1. When public services compete, users can choose from more than one provider. In this world, transparency helps users make better choices among these providers.
2. Where there is little competition, but individual public service providers appear willing to engage in reforms, the contribution of information is to enhance the efforts of these providers. Information about actual practices and outcomes can help collaborative problem solving between community members and providers in which both develop more effective delivery practices.
3. Where there is little competition and service providers appear unwilling to engage in reforms, the role of information is to provide clarity about the main areas of underperformance and enhance the capacity of beneficiaries to pressure providers to increase their performance. The goal is to shift from a balance of power between citizens and providers in which providers are able to ignore the costs to citizens of their underperformance to one in which providers find it difficult to ignore these costs.
4. In a world of little competition, where service providers appear unwilling to engage in reforms but policymakers and/or politicians are willing to engage, citizens or their champions can avoid the difficulties of pressuring providers directly by collaborating with politicians and policymakers at a higher level in the reform project. In this world, the prime users of information need not be citizens themselves; they may be CSO advocates and policymakers. The role of information is to show how exactly public services are underperforming, so as to empower reform-minded policymakers or their allied advocates in civil society to craft policies such as incentives or sanctions to reduce frontline provider absenteeism.
5. Finally, in a world of little competition, where neither providers nor policymakers appear willing to reform — by far the most difficult one for T/A interventions to make a difference — the potential contribution of information is to mobilize broad-based social action that will ultimately change the incentives of policymakers and, thereby, providers. In this world, the role of information is to reveal the underperformance of public services, so as to trigger collective action by citizens or civil society to incentivize or punish either providers or policymakers and politicians — for example, through social protest or at the ballot box.

Successful transparency programs are likely to be those that use their assessments of which world they are operating within to plot the path of least resistance through the short and long routes of accountability, with a mix of collaboration with allies and confrontation with those who stand in the way of improvement.

From Transparency to Accountability in the Five Worlds