Accountability in Public International Development Finance
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12273 |
| Author | Kate Macdonald,May Miller‐Dawkins |
| Date | 01 November 2015 |
| Published date | 01 November 2015 |
Accountability in Public International
Development Finance
Kate Macdonald
University of Melbourne
May Miller-Dawkins
Corelab
Amidst an explosion of new global governance practices
during the last quarter century, one of the most striking
developments has been the rise of new norms and insti-
tutions of accountability. The world of development
finance has been a central site in which this new politics
of accountability has unfolded. Under scrutiny and pres-
sure from civil society groups and key countries, promi-
nent international development financing institutions
have increasingly acknowledged the need for them to
answer for their decisions to an expanding array of
‘stakeholders’outside their own organisations, increase
transparency, strengthen dialogue with external stake-
holders, promote adherence to internal policies, and in
some cases also provide access to grievance procedures
for people affected by development finance activities.
As ‘moral or institutional relation[s] in which one agent
(or group of agents) is accorded entitlements to ques-
tion, direct, sanction or constrain the actions of another’
(Macdonald, 2014, p. 428) accountability systems play an
important role in shaping the claims that development
actors are empowered to place on one another, as they
contest development policy making in accordance with
their values and interests. It is not surprising then that
political controversies concerning the design of account-
ability institutions often centre on normative disagree-
ments about who owes obligations of responsiveness to
whom. Yet such debates are not wholly or even primarily
normative in character. Rather, debate surrounding the
practical design of accountability institutions is usually
underpinned also by empirical questions about what
institutional qualities enable or constrain accountability
mechanisms to promote desired normative purposes.
Scholars and practitioners engaging with (ie engaging
WITH, not simply engaging) such debates have combined
normative and empirical analysis in varying ways.
The collection of papers presented here brings
together three empirical studies of public accountability
mechanisms that currently govern both bilateral and
multilateral public development finance. The questions
addressed by contributors are animated in important
ways by normative concerns about the responsiveness of
public institutions to their stakeholders. Yet the main
contribution of the papers is to enrich empirical under-
standing of the practical functioning of accountability
institutions. Each contributor examines how the account-
ability mechanisms they have studied play out ‘on the
ground’, and how accountability practices are shaped by
the wider political and cultural environments in which
accountability institutions emerge, operate and evolve.
The analytical goals of the collection are thus partly eval-
uative: to assess the implications of varying accountabil-
ity arrangements for contested development outcomes
and processes –and, in particular, implications for pro-
ject affected people. The goals are also interpretive and
explanatory: to identify significant currents of change in
accountability practices across varying contexts, and gen-
erate insights into the underlying causal mechanisms
and processes that drive institutional change –shaping
and constraining the capacity of accountability mecha-
nisms to achieve their intended normative purposes.
Reflecting this central interest in how accountability
mechanisms work in practice in specific political and
institutional contexts, each paper grounds its analysis in
empirical qualitative case studies of particular account-
ability institutions, and in some cases, particular disputes.
Qualitative case-based methods provide insight into the
complex, dynamic processes that characterize the practi-
cal operation of transnational accountability mechanisms,
and dynamics of their change (George and Bennett,
2005). Such methods offer particularly important tools for
analyzing the contextual particularities of specific institu-
tions and disputes (Mjøset, 2009). Thick description of
contextual detail enables authors to identify patterns of
norms, institutions and power relations that are of partic-
ular salience in a given context (Brady and Collier, 2010).
While case based analyses of these kinds cannot be gen-
eralized across an ‘entire universe of instances’(George
and Bennett, 2005, p. xi), they offer insights into causal
Global Policy (2015) 6:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12273 ©2015 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 6 . Issue 4 . November 2015 429
Special Section Article
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