Proving TPA’s relevance in an increasingly autocratic world
Global trends
Author: Linnea Mills. Articles on global trends are based on a review of relevant literature and interviews with a carefully selected number of thought leaders. More on scope, methodology and sources.
In this article:
- The urgent need for stronger evidence
- Finding the missing link between TPA and development impact
- New ways of working and organising in the TPA field
- The risks posed by new ways of working
The urgent need for stronger evidence
A familiar challenge, a renewed imperative
In 2010, the UK Department for International Development (now the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) decided it was high time we better understood the impact and effectiveness of initiatives in the transparency, participation and accountability (TPA) field and commissioned John Gaventa and Rosemary McGee to assess the evidence.
They found that the field relied on ‘untested normative assumptions and under-specified relationships between mechanisms and outcomes’ and that ‘the available evidence of impact is uneven and sparse, considering the amount of attention and donor funding focused on this field’ (Gaventa and McGee, 2013: 11, 16).
A decade on, not only do many knowledge gaps remain, but the imperative to show that the TPA field’s assumptions are still relevant is now even more vital given global trends towards autocratisation and top-down policymaking.
In a world that’s increasingly turning its back on democratic ideals and amid a political climate in which many governments strive to discredit democracy and civic participation, the TPA field cannot afford to stand on anything less than solid ground.
According to the experts and thought leaders we spoke to, the lack of evidence about the impact of TPA initiatives is now an existential threat to the field. As one thought leader we spoke to described it, the window of opportunity for social accountability will remain open only if we can surface evidence that social accountability works and is worthy of continued support.
Of course, many factors influence donor support to issues and countries, and TPA can be supported because of its intrinsic value of enhancing democracy, as well as its instrumental value of enhancing public services.
The risk of a TPA backlash, however, is not just real from the perspective of governments and funders but also from citizens themselves.
Some recent evidence has pointed to citizen withdrawal as a result of transparency and participation not being perceived to lead to accountability. One such study, found evidence that in countries with high levels of corruption, transparency is associated with a sense of resignation and withdrawal from public engagement among citizens (Bauhr and Grimes, 2014).
A systematic evidence review found that the effects of transparency are very much a product of the environment where it is put into practice (Cucciniello et al., 2017). It is particularly alarming, then, that research being conducted in the TPA field is greatly skewed. As one thought leader noted:
It is surprising if you look at literature reviews on tax in Africa, there are hardly any serious Southern academics and universities featuring.
Research institutions in the Global South generally have fewer opportunities to access public funding as compared with their Northern counterparts. External donors and funders therefore have an important role to play in filling the resource gap. Understanding these critical conditions remains a frontier in TPA research, and there is value in seeking the perspective of those who best understand the operating context.
Finding the missing link between TPA and development impact
If there are question marks about the power of transparency and participation to create accountability, there is even more uncertainty about TPA having development impact. One thought leader told us:
There’s a fatigue, both among actors in the TPA field and more broadly that quite a lot of resources have been spent on transparency and participation but that does not seem to be translating into actual lives being transformed and actual improvements in public service delivery. The question is, what is the missing link?
The missing link contender one: the implementation gap
For many TPA initiatives, the outcome of their work is the formal enactment of laws and regulations, these include disclosure laws in natural resource governance or transparency in government procurement, among others (Mills, 2019; NRGI, 2019).
Various TPA actors and initiatives (including Hewlett Foundation grantees) have started paying attention to what they call the ‘implementation gap’ — that is the failure to fully and properly apply, uphold and enforce enacted TPA laws.
The assumed link between accountability-related reforms and development progress breaks down in the absence of effective implementation.
For example, a budget holder’s failure to execute a country (or sector) budget in accordance with the laws voted for by parliament or congress (de Renzio et al., 2019). How can a budget set aside for health services provision lead to better health if the money that exists on paper is never spent?
The missing link contender two: accountability ecosystems
Also gaining attention in discussions on the ‘missing link’ between TPA and development impact is the role of accountability ecosystems. This challenges the approach of many TPA actors that has tended to focus on strengthening accountability institutions in isolation from the wider, interrelated context in which they operate.
Recently published research on auditing systems showed that, in impact terms, little can be expected from strengthening supreme audit institutions if at the same time the institutions and processes that engage with the audit findings (including parliamentary accounts committees and civil society organisations) remain weak (IBP/IDI, 2020).
On the other side of the coin, some are cautiously optimistic that the enormous stimulus packages prompted by the global Covid-19 pandemic may help to make financial accountability a greater political priority, which may — if it receives enough attention — have a lasting positive effect on wider accountability systems.
New ways of working and organising in the TPA field
Citizen movements and protests at the centre of global issue
To remain and further demonstrate its relevance, the TPA field must find ways to be part of the solutions to the major global challenges of our times, such as climate change, democracy and equality. As one thought leader put it:
Funders are under pressure to connect TPA to the Southern unemployment crisis or racial inequality, democracy, etc. They try to find a bigger waterfront of issues and see how they relate, and this is filtering down to those groups that are specific transparency and accountability actors. How does their work reinforce broader movements? I see a number of donors struggling with that adaptation right now. This is what I see taking up a lot of the debates and strategy sessions of different organisations.
Rather than the traditionally-organised TPA actors being at the centre of these global issues, mass protests and grassroots movements (in their various guises) are becoming the order of the day.
In 2019, citizens mobilised in the millions to demand political action to combat climate change, with teenager Greta Thunberg as their unlikely front figure, and 2020 will go down in history for the mass mobilisation of citizens against racial inequality.
Professionalisation versus grassroots: a paradox for legitimacy
These citizen movements are — or at least are perceived to be — closer to citizens and this is becoming the Achilles heel of the TPA field, in which NGOs and INGOs often appear professional but detached given they are often based in the Global North or in capital cities.
On the one hand, the professionalisation of civil society organisations has enabled them to engage in high-level and technical conversations in areas such as natural resource governance. On the other, there is a fear that this has removed them from the grassroots and in so doing stripped them of their legitimacy among decision-makers. As one thought leader from an INGO explained:
Policymakers ask ‘Who are you speaking for? Who do you represent? Why should I be listening to you?’. The more removed you are from citizens and the voices on the ground the less legitimacy your voice has. In turn, the lack of legitimacy undermines your capacity and ability to exert pressure on governments. So, we find that we are producing a lot of knowledge but our ability to force the government to act is limited.
It is not only policymakers who question who it is that these organisations speak for; their legitimacy is also questioned by the very citizens they are supposed to represent.
Meanwhile, as professionalised TPA organisations have struggled to defend their legitimacy, grassroots campaigners face the challenge of translating protest energy into policy impact.
Recent research by the Carnegie Institute for Peace puts forward two options to reconcile this divide. The first is for professionalised NGOs to try to ‘hybridise’, developing in-house capacity for both policy analysis and mass mobilisation. The other option is for these organisations to build formal or informal coalitions with groups that are working at the grassroots level.
Both of these strategies pose challenges: NGOs will need to develop new skills, attempt to bring together distinct organisational cultures and methodologies, and define and articulate policy demands that are not only technically sound but publicly appealing. In many instances, coalition-building will be an easier road given it does not require altering internal organisational and personnel structures (Bellows, 2020).
Strength in numbers
Increased coalition-building is already happening, as one thought leader noted:
Coalitions are definitely a trend that seems to be increasing whereby many organisations are no longer engaging as themselves but rather are seeking to find ways of pulling in other people. So, you don’t see big organisations forming in this space but rather many small organisations coming together. This might be a survival tactic because there are only so many resources.
Coalition-building is also, as suggested here, a risk mitigation strategy and as the civil space shrinks in many countries, we are likely to see more and more civil society organisations (CSOs) joining forces.
In one recent and interesting example from Ghana, more than 400 CSOs joined forces to challenge the President’s decision to force the head of the country’s supreme audit institution to take a substantial period of leave from his position. The coalition argued that the President’s directive to the Auditor-General, who is reputed as a staunch anti-corruption campaigner, goes against the spirit and letter of Ghana’s 1992 Constitution (GhanaWeb, 2020). A smaller number of CSOs subsequently took the government to court.
The risks posed by new ways of working
New and different ways of organising the TPA field looks set to be a lasting trend — whether professionalised NGOs join forces with grassroots movements vertically or form horizontal CSO coalitions.
These changes will raise important questions related to risk, both for donors and for organisations and initiatives that accept external funding.
In recent years, some larger bilateral donors have started paying greater attention to risk management (Gulrajani and Mills, 2019). Risk management is not about eliminating risks but rather articulating them and putting in place measures to mitigate these and any unanticipated risks.
From the perspective of development cooperation, risk can be grouped into three overlapping categories (OECD, 2014):
- Contextual risk refers to the range of potential adverse outcomes that may arise in a particular context, such as the risk to civic engagement related to the trend of autocratisation and subsequent closing of civil space. A donor has only a limited influence on contextual risk in the short term, but they seek to support interventions that create conditions for reduced contextual risk in the long term.
- Programmatic risk relates to the risk that interventions do not achieve their objectives or cause inadvertent harm by, for example, exacerbating social tensions. Programmatic risks relate to weaknesses in programme design and implementation or a dysfunctional relationship between the donor and their implementing partners/grantees.
- Institutional risk refers to the range of potential consequences of various types of failure in the programmes/projects intervention can have for donor or grantee. Reputational risk is an important part of institutional risk. Since donors use public money or donations and are consequently scrutinised by political processes and/or by the press, they very much trade on their reputation. That reputation can be seriously damaged very quickly, say by a corruption scandal involving a grantee.
In terms of the trend towards vertical collaboration between NGOs and grassroots organisations, the added risk to donors could be that, through grants to NGOs, it becomes (indirectly) implicated in party politics. This is particularly the case in countries where popular movements are linked to opposition parties or have other political or religious affiliations.
A similarly cautious approach may be warranted when it comes to building or joining CSO coalitions. Individual grantees can be vetted, but if these grantees are in or form coalitions with other CSOs, this can implicate the grantmaker in whatever these other actors are involved in.
There is also potential programmatic risk involved in supporting grassroots movements or professionalised NGOs who wish to create vertical links to movements, and this has to do with the potential harm external funding can cause. Governments in various autocratising contexts have tried to delegitimise organisations that accept foreign funding and prevent external funding from reaching the TPA space.
In Ethiopia, for example, the government’s narrative is that foreign funding is what is spurring an industry of activist citizens who are pushing for government accountability. To that end, the government enacted a law that said that if a CSO gets more than a certain percentage of its budget from external sources it has to register as a foreign agent, which also has the effect of disallowing them from undertaking certain activities. The governments of Tanzania and Kenya are moving along a similar path.
As one thought leader cautioned:
While support for movements is critical, it needs to be done in a way that enhances the movement, and we need to study what has worked in this regard. Where has external support to movements really made a positive contribution? Studying the Black Lives Matter movement in the US might be a good starting point. Importantly, efforts should be made to understand what funding does to movements before it’s undertaken.
Some useful groundwork has been laid in this regard with a recent report by Datta and Baertl (2020) on why and how collaboration between think tanks and social movements takes place, and how funders can best support such collaboration.
