 Well, good afternoon, everyone. I'm Tom Carruthers, Vice President here at the Carnegie Endowment. It's my pleasure to be the moderator for today's meeting. I hardly need to tell this group, looking around the room, that the subject of empowerment and accountability has been growing very steadily within the development community over the past five to seven years. It's pretty hard to be against empowerment or against accountability, although I guess you could manage to mount a case if you really wanted to. But it's a set of topics that's as important as it can also be analytically frustrating at times because of its breadth and its vagueness, if you will. Yet it's just unquestionably at the cutting edge of what needs to happen in countries that are struggling to provide better governance and better outcomes for people within them. And it's really a great pleasure today to bring this topic together with the subject of fragility and conflict, which is another set of concepts and ideas that's also growing steadily in the development community. So this isn't exactly King Kong versus Godzilla, but it's two big ideas coming together. And it's really a pleasure to do that in the form of a meeting that features the work of a couple of different institutions that we're going to hear about, but a group overseen by John Coventa at the Institute for Development Studies and Anu Joshi is going to talk about that in a minute. The Empowerment and Accountability Research Initiative. I'll get the name right. A4EA is the acronym, so remember that. But also the Accountability Research Center that Jonathan Fox has launched at American University, which we'll also be hearing about another important initiative in this area. So here's how we're going to proceed. The meeting is going to be in two parts. We have a lot of content, a lot of great people. So we're going to move fairly quickly. The first segment for roughly the first hour, we're going to hear a discussion of several pretty interesting different cases. I'm going to actually start with Anna, who's going to talk a little bit about the program overall. But then I'm going to turn to Sarah Khan, who's going to talk about the case of Pakistan and some research being done there. And then Mahail Saeed, who's going to talk about some work in Egypt. And then Stephanie Deshasi, who's going to talk about Myanmar. But in each of the cases, after the person makes an initial short presentation, I'm going to engage them in a bit of discussion and then bring all of you in. And then we'll proceed case by case. There's going to be a lot of discussion, a lot of chance to talk. There's a lot of talent and experience here in the room. And we want to bring this out. I'm just looking around to see lots of people I'd already like to call on. So we'll do that. That's the first segment. Then they're going to step down really quickly. And up onto the platform is going to step John Gaventa, and Joy Asaron, and Jonathan Fox. And I'm going to engage them in a broader conversation about the state of the field of accountability and empowerment. We're going to go from the specific to the general, if you will, and talk about how this field is evolving and what are some of the difficulties in its evolution, some of the frontier issues that we see looking ahead five to 10 years in this field, both from a research perspective, but also a practical perspective. So this is really in the spirit of both the Accountability Research Center and A4EA, an attempt to really bring together research and practice perspectives. And I know the room has, by looking around again, both researchers and practitioners, which is great. So without further ado, let me turn to Anu Joshi first, who's going to introduce A4EA and give it just a shorter overview. And then we'll turn to our case status. Thank you, Tom. And thank you, everybody, for coming here and giving us an opportunity to say a little bit about the research that we've just started. We are about six months in. And this is a DFID-funded research consortium that involves six partner organizations. IDS is leading. And we have the Accountability Research Center that Jonathan leads. In addition, we have ITAD, which is a consultancy firm in the UK. We have PASCAR, which is the partnership for social and governance research based in Nairobi. We have the collective and ideas to organizations that are based in Pakistan. And finally, we also work with OxfamGB. And this research is happening through five countries, which I should say right away that we're working in context of fragility, but not in fragile states. We call them fragile settings, because these are states which have pockets of fragility. So we want to look at the pockets and what happens in these pockets of fragility as compared to some of the other most stable situations. So the countries are. We have Egypt, Nigeria, Mozambique, Myanmar, and Pakistan. And as you'll see, these are not fragile states everywhere. They have pockets of fragility. So that's the overall program as it stands. And what we're doing really is our overall framework is saying, well, what are the context? What are the specific features of these contexts that matter for social and political action? How does it translate into processes and strategies that groups use who are engaged in mobilization for accountability? And then what are these sorts of outcomes we should expect and care about? What are emerging in these settings? So what makes this program different from all the accountability research that has gone on from before? Well, we think there are four things that make this program slightly different and more cutting edges, if you will, Tom. So the first thing is that we actually would like to separate out processes that lead to empowerment versus processes that lead to accountability. These two processes might go together in some settings, but sometimes not. And we shouldn't expect that they always go together. So let's unpack this thing. So sometimes voice works. Sometimes states are responsive. But these things might not be going together. The second thing is, as Tom mentioned, we would like to explore these processes in fragile and conflict and violent settings, partly because most of what we know about processes of empowerment and accountability has come from more stable middle income countries, the Indias, the Brazils, the South Africans, which also have pockets of fragility, but from the more stable bits of these countries, where we see movements that might lead to accountability. So we're focusing on the context that our fragile and conflict affected, where informal institutions matter more than formal ones, where there's long history of violence, repression, which has led to fear and trauma in people, that they might not take social action or collective action, and where there's a lot of fragmentation of authority, where the state's not the only player in town where you might have armed groups, informal institutions, religious organizations, a whole range of actors. And so how does accountability work in these settings? Who are you holding accountable for what? The third thing that we want to look at is we want to move away in our research from looking at social accountability itself, but frame it in broader political, economic, and social processes, which is why we are calling it social and political action for empowerment and accountability. And we want to widen our view, looking both at how change happens within these countries by itself. And the final point, the fourth thing that makes our program different, is we are explicitly looking at the role of external actors. And mainly by external actors, we mean donors or organizations that bring in money to these settings. They could be multilaterals, bilaterals, or even INGOs. And in these sorts of settings, what are the roles that these external actors can play to be supportive of ongoing processes, and in which ways can they be undermining them and when should they be stepping back in practice? So those are some of the ways in which we think our program is different. I'll tell you very quickly, briefly if I have time, about the approach we are taking in our program. So what we are trying to do is the first thing, because we know these contexts, even if they're fragile and conflict affected, they're actually very different in their particularities of how these things express themselves, what forms, violence takes, et cetera. And so what we want to do as a first step is to try and understand what empowerment and accountability even means in these contexts for these people. So taking a sort of a bottom-up view, what do people expect of state or public institutions? What do they think about empowerment processes? The second thing is that we know that in these situations, a lot of work has gone into peace-building and state-building at the national level. But we think that there are a lot of things happening quite interestingly at the sub-national level. And what we'd like to do is take a sub-national view, exploring progress towards accountability. I mean, what are the pathways through which accountability might be achieved? Where is it happening? We know it's patchy, we know it's uneven, we know that you can make some progress and some regress, but we want to capture these processes as they occur. Then finally, we're particularly interested in the inclusivity of these processes and specifically in the role that women's political action can play. So when do women get empowered and what role do they play in terms of demanding accountability? And we'll have some discussion more on what research we're doing along those lines. And finally, of course, we're looking explicitly at the role of external actors, as I mentioned before. Looking at two things in particular, are external actors actually thinking about their work in terms of what impacts it can have at scale, both the idea of vertical integration but the ability to actually change systemic power relations. And I think this has really come from the notion that most of the work that has been successful has been very locally based. And then the second thing that we want to do in the six-turned-lactor stream of work is to look at whether the new ideas of adaptive management, adaptive learning actually make a difference in these settings. What can we learn by these new approaches that have been tried out in these places? And we'll hear again from one of our colleagues here about how that then rules. So I'll stop there. Perfect, okay, well, that's a great overview. Wow, that's a lot of different aspects. But that's great. So we're gonna turn to the three case studies and what we want to think about various questions but to start, you put it in our minds, is the many different facets of accountability or approaches to this topic and in each of these contexts being so different. Think about the particular research approach or the questions that you're asking. So Sarah, tell us a bit about the work in Pakistan. So the project that we're working on in Pakistan is situated specifically in the space of political accountability and even more specifically electoral accountability. So Pakistan over the past decade has seen progress on electoral accountability in the sense that we've had the first elections where there was a transfer of power from one democratically elected government to another. And this creates incentives for political parties and representatives to listen to and respond to the demands of voters. But the question is who is being listened to and who is being excluded in this, where we see this increased potential for electoral accountability. And it looks like women are being systematically excluded from this potential pathway. So in the 2013 elections, there were stark gender gaps both in voter registration as well as in voter turnout. And these were gaps that increased, if anything, from the 2008 elections. And this is where our focus is for the project. We're looking at what works to encourage and mobilize women to participate as voters in the next upcoming 2018 elections. In terms of where we are looking at this problem, so there are certain areas in Pakistan where you see instances of outright bans on women's turnout. And this is in constituencies in the federally administered tribal areas. But outside of that, you see the gap at lower levels, even in places where you might not expect to. So in the large cities of Lahore and Peshawar, urbanization is an important phenomenon in Pakistan. And it goes along with increased educational attainment for women as well as increased opportunities for employment outside the home. But what we're not seeing is a concurrent increase in political participation. So we're seeing that this gender gap is rigid and large also in these urban contexts. So we'll be looking at Lahore and Peshawar specifically as part of this project and thinking through the puzzle of why is it that even in these contexts where we might expect women to participate, we still see under participation. We're looking at two specific questions through a field experimental approach. And one of them is, are civil society actors more or less effective than political parties in mobilizing women? So some of the work that we've done so far has been looking at how these two actors approach the question of mobilizing women in a very different way. So this is something that civil society actors have perhaps been doing for longer, targeting women specifically. But in terms of political parties, when we look at the ground level political party workers and activists, very few of them are actively reaching out to women. So we're interested in this question of what happens when political parties actively target and reach out to women and whether that can increase women's motivation for turning out to vote and engaging in a space that's seen as pretty masculine. The second question that we're interested in is whether actively involving men in these mobilization campaigns can make a difference. So one of the reasons behind women's under participation we think is patriarchal norms and the sort of gatekeepers of those norms are more often men than women. And so we're interested in knowing what happens if we engage men on the idea of the importance of women's participation and whether that can help induce change. Yeah, I have one or two questions that I wanna ask you for questions you might have for Sarah. To what extent are trying to bring in the sort of fragility and conflict angle here into this? To what extent do you feel you're dealing with legacies of violence, either sort of social violence or political violence or other forms of conflict into this, into the sort of what's happening with the electoral accountability? The question of participation and electoral accountability. Yeah, so in both of the cities that we're working in they've seen large terrorist attacks in the past few years and what's specifically important for our project is how the context of violence which is often expected also in the lead up to an election and in particularly competitive constituencies, how does that differentially affect women? And so it's possible that when violence is expected the norms around women's mobility become even stronger and so there's an urge that women in particular should stay at home and not go out because there is a fear of violence. So I think we're trying to look at what the differential responsiveness is to expectations of violence specifically in the electoral context. Another question is I was doing some research two years ago on women's empowerment programs that were related to women's political participation and I didn't find that many studies of there's been many, many programs around the world to try to increase women's political participation in different ways. Voting, registering as candidates, taking part in party life and so forth. Did you feel when you may still be doing it kind of a literature review or looking at the base of knowledge in this area what did I miss a lot or what did you find? So I think that a lot of the focus on the recent focus on women's political participation has been on the potential gains from women's participation as leaders so the effects of quotas for women. Right, that was quotas is heavily, yeah, that's a problem. But there's less on what women's political participation as voters means for future outcomes for women and this is something that we know about from the context of advanced industrialized democracies. So for instance from, we know that after suffrage was introduced in the United States and the UK, there was an expansion of welfare policies and health policies. So we see a responsiveness to these specific demands and policies that are especially salient for women and we don't really know how that plays out in developing contexts or other contexts. So that's something that we're particularly interested in is to look at how do political actors then respond to increased participation by women. I think that's an open question. One more question on, Turg Dey. And so you mentioned civil society groups and differential approaches or effects of that. Tell me a little bit more about the kinds of civil society groups you're talking about or you have in mind. Yeah, so we're looking at women's rights organizations that have in Pakistan been involved with community level organizing with women and specifically connecting women's demands to service providers or local level representatives. And in the 2013 elections, there was women's rights organizations as well as a broader swath of civil society organizations, one among which is the Free and Fair Elections Network in Pakistan, which is a consortium of a number of organizations, bringing to attention some of the statistics around women's voter registration and so calling for a women's voter registration emergency in Pakistan and bringing this to the attention of the parliament as well as the election commission. And we've seen responsiveness to this kind of civil pressure both from the parliament, which has recently introduced an election law amendment that empowers the election commission in Pakistan to declare an election where women's turnout is less than 10% as null and void. We've also seen the election commission itself take some initiative to increase women's participation through educational campaigns and voter information campaigns in the past election and they plan to do that again. Any questions for Sarah, some initial thoughts? Jim, do you want to introduce yourself? We've only got one microphone in this part of things. Gus, do you have the microphone? If so, please come down here. Jim, just go ahead and speak up. Hi, Jim Michael. Yeah, thank you for that. So I think we see voting as an entry point to some of the bigger issues that are at play and so I think the very basic issue that women aren't seen as constituents by political parties means that there's reduced electoral incentive for any kind of responsiveness to them. I think women also, and some of our survey work has shown, have preferences that look different from those of men. So if they participate, we might actually see an electoral incentive to provide some of the kinds of policies and services that women find salient or are demanding. So I think we see it as an entry point and I think outside of voting, some of the interviews that we've done with citizens show that voting is seen as a lever for future contact with one's representative. So for instance, someone said about a local representative, well, I voted for him so when I go to try and talk to him, he has to listen to me. And so even in this context where you have these questions of how responsive is the government at large, I think you have these opportunities for responsiveness, especially in local level interactions with representatives and having voted and being perceived as a voter can be an important lever for demanding responsiveness in those interactions. Good question though, Jim. I think we'll come back in the second segment because this issue of, in a sense, this is one of the biggest challenges with accountability research and action is the relationship between the whole and the parts or the national, the regional, the local and how one connects those things. And so how does an entry point at one level connect to larger questions? So it's a good question. In Pakistan, of course, hard to avoid anywhere, but Pakistan really stirs you in the face. Another question or two, yeah, just introduce yourself. Come to these two then we'll move on to the next case. I'd like to introduce yourself and where you're from. Hi, I'm Arturo Bolondi, ex-MA development in IDS 2014, and now consultant with the World Bank. I find it very interesting that you somehow divide political parties and civil society because to my understanding, political parties are part of the civil society. And... Is that what you learned at IDS? John, is that what you guys are talking about? John, is that what you guys are talking about? Not necessarily the government. This is my point. So how can... So if you're moving from elected governments to another one and that's the hope that it will go on, then of course the offer of political solutions and political parties will differ. Then where is the politics in, let's say, what you have called civil society organizations, say women, rights or other, that is yes, they can connect to services, but political parties are precisely that civil society organizations that connect with politics. And therefore, I don't know, I find it strange somehow to divide it and I find it problematic that you have politics-free organizations pushing to vote. To vote for whom? Is there a response? Yeah, so I think we're thinking of civil society organizations that are non-partisans, so specifically NGOs as well as community organizations that are explicitly non-partisan. And then political parties are partisan and so when they're asking you to vote, they're saying vote for us. Whereas when the actors that I'm calling civil society and non-partisan encourage someone to vote, it's saying you should vote because it's a good thing and it's normatively important to participate in democracy. And that's one of the delineations of messaging that we've seen from these two types of actors. And one of the questions that we're really interested in is what motivates citizens more? This type of message around the normative importance of participation or a message around saying vote for us and then we'll do this for you because those are two different inducements to vote and it'll be interesting to see which one appeals more and resonates more with women. Okay, that's a good question, interesting. One last question and then we'll move on, yeah. Thank you. A black line course from Accountability Lab. We work on accountability in Pakistan as well. And I wondered whether you could talk a bit more about if you're looking at the role of social media in all of this. The Pakistani elite are extremely vocal on social media, particularly recently around a number of women's rights related issues within political parties as well as within civil society. And are you seeing that filter down and cascade into some of these conversations or some of the information that you're collecting from the bottom up? Yeah, so I think some of the rhetoric around women's issues that political parties and the government have taken up have been things that explicitly involve women. So the question of for instance, violence against women and the Punjab government here has been especially proactive and setting up centers for violence against women. That's certainly part of what we're looking at but we're also thinking about how politics at large is kind of seen as a masculine space and within that there's a perception that there's women's issues but politics as large is not seen as something that women participate in outside of these specific issues. So in a way we're interested in seeing also the more everyday issues around service provision and general policies outside of these women's specific policies and what women's opinions are on those and whether and how they're substantially different from those of men. Okay, let's keep moving. Let's go on to the case of Egypt now. Different entry point, different focus of the research, very different national context. Tell us a bit about what you're doing there. Actually, my context is very, very different because I come from a university context where the accountability work we're doing is not about educational accountability but rather it's accountability to defend women and violence against women. We have started an anti-sexual harassment unit at Cairo University and this is the unit that's involved actually with the research that IDS is doing because what we're looking at is we're looking at how can we actually mobilize, how can collaborative work actually mobilize around not only empowerment but also accountability. And when we talk about accountability here, I'm not talking about the accountability of the administration, but I'm also looking at the accountability of the whole academic society because we have to, we struggle with cultural norms that tolerate sexual harassment and that blames the victim that normalizes sexual harassment. So when we talk about sexual harassment, we find a lot of resistance. So in this research, what we're looking at is, we're looking at two very specific things and we're doing this through action research. We're doing, we're trying to figure out what kinds of actions are actually going to lead to a sustained intolerance or zero tolerance of sexual harassment. And this is like through different kinds of advocacy campaigns and so on. And the second thing we're doing, actually doing three things, the second thing we're doing is actually we're also trying to expand into like larger domains. Hospitals, okay, it's no surprise that Egypt is ranks number two after Afghanistan on sexual harassment, the rate of sexual harassment. So it is a problem that everybody acknowledges a problem, but we all deny that it exists. It is a problem in reports, but it doesn't really happen here. It's not us. And one of the main challenges that we faced is like people, the scientific schools that is like School of Medicine, School of Engineering, School of Science, they would also say, they would always say, you know what, it's the humanities that have time for this. We don't have any time for that. Of course. And of course the humanities say that, we don't have labs. It's labs where, or we don't stay long hours. This is when sexual harassment takes place. So we're expanding into teaching hospitals, which is a very new domain for us, but our strategy has always been, and with the support of IDS, we're actually with action research fits very well, because we're learning as we go along. Like every time we take an action, we're learning from that. We've only been there only for three years now, and we have, when we started three years ago, we look very different than we are now. So because of the different actions we're taking, and because it is a very new thing. It's a model that we have devised, that did not exist before we have devised, and accordingly, it's a very rich learning experience as well. And therefore this action research is also going to be actually helping us document as we go along. The third thing that we're trying to do is we're trying to establish a network, a network of other universities. We've already trained 14 universities on how to establish and why to establish anti-harassment units and violence against women units, and we're researching how can this network actually influence policy and change the bylaws and the university, the Supreme Council bylaws for the universities to combat sexual harassment. Thank you. That's an excellent introduction. I have a couple of questions. As you've thought about, as you say, trying to focus in on what kinds of actions will produce change in this domain, have you been operating by thinking about parallel or not necessarily exactly similar, but other domains where there has been positive progress or maybe where it's failed to produce kind of, as you say, growing intolerance towards something that was objectionable in a sense, or is this by itself and you're thinking about as a sort of domain of action? Actually, I haven't been thinking that way. It has been a spontaneous evolution of this unit because it all started off with a very simple, like drafting of a policy and working very closely with other players in the society that are involved with sexual harassment or combatting sexual harassment. And it started evolving spontaneously. So I haven't actually, and that's the beauty of the whole idea of action research because we're acting on the spur of the minute. And it's like, we get an idea, so let's try that now. Yeah, okay, right. I don't know how you feel about it. I don't know if some of you have seen it. If you want a two-minute introduction into sexual harassment in Egypt, I don't know what you think about this film. It was when I was in Egypt one time, I met the filmmakers. It was a short film of a woman walking across the bridge. It's just a woman walking across one of the main bridges across the Nile and that she's had a camera sort of hidden. And she simply takes this two-minute walk across the bridge and every single encounter she has with the male as she walks across the bridge is essentially a form of harassment. It's just stunning. It's just a stunning film to see. It's on YouTube, I think it's called The Bridge, something like that. It made quite an impression on me when I was in Cairo. Actually, I do use those kinds of films in my awareness campaigns because we all deny there's sexual harassment every single person I've met, even in integration, like when somebody has been, is being questioned. The first response is, I did not do anything. I know, she's imagining, you know, it's like. So this is, and the whole understanding of what sexual harassment really is is not really, people are not aware of what sexual harassment is. If somebody comes and says like, this person has sexual harassment, I'd ask me, the first question would be, where did he touch you? It's like, no, he did not touch me. It's not about touching. So I use those kinds of films and I actually, I'm involved in another project now with the South Med funded by the EU producing different kinds of films to use in our campaigns, in our campaigns with students, with faculty and administrators. One other question I want to ask the audience that they have a couple of questions for you is again, same question I asked Sarah's, legacies of violence and conflict here. Obviously, sexual violence is surged. It's ugly head at various times throughout recent years in Egypt as part of the protest movement or in protest context and others. How, tell me a little bit about as you connect all of the research in this project to different settings of conflict and violence. How are you thinking about that in the Egyptian case? Actually, yes. I mean, we have, we connected to, we work with all of the civil society organizations that have been working to combat sexual harassment. We've been doing a lot of research on our own as well. Because at the end of the day, we're an academic institution, so we do research. You know, it's like, so. And we have, we're trying to stay away from governmental institutions that handle, because we cherish our independence and we cherish, you know, our own policies. We don't want anybody to enforce anything else. But of course, we take all of those in considerations and a lot of time people ask us, you know, to why don't you come and we just refrain because we just, we want to sustain our independence. Plus, we're still very young and we're still very, we're still learning as I was telling you, so. All right. A couple of questions for Moha. Yes, in the back there, right there. My name is Mohamed Yasin. Yeah, we hear you. Yeah. My name is Mohamed Yasin. Thanks, Ms. Moha for your input. And I have a specific question about what you mentioned about involving with other governmental institutions concerning from only gender to other accountability issues in Egypt. What kind of possible action can be done to go beyond and ensure not being limited to gender issues, especially when you work with action research, your work eventually can evolve around other structural and institutional discrimination and marginalization, which both politics. We try to be apolitical because I was just telling you on the way here, I think that, okay, I personally, as Mahan, not as the executive director of the anti-harassment unit, I'm an activist that defends freedom of speech and all of that. However, as the executive director of the anti-harassment unit, I focus, I try to be apolitical. I don't want anybody to stop the work that I'm doing. So I basically negotiate around all the obstacles that I get and I try and I insist on being apolitical so that nobody would stop me or that would not hinder. I just want to focus on the cause. I was just telling, I know that actually on the way here. That's an implicit question I actually have for Sarah too, but I think it's going to apply to all of these three case study presentations is the high degree of sensitivity of the issues and the research involved. And obviously in Egypt, this is a moment of terrible difficulties and repression. And the university space has been an area where there's been attempts at independence action and a tremendous amount of repression within the university as well. So I can imagine, as you say, trying to carve out and say, I'm doing this, I'm not connected to politics, I'm trying to proceed down this path is. Let's take another question or two for Mahaa. Yes, right there. Hi, thanks for the presentation. I'm Amy and I'm originally from Egypt as well. So I'm familiar with the harassment problem there. And my question is part of the harassment problem there also is when women internalized oppression and they feel that they deserve it and because maybe of their clothes or anything. So and I know that the very conservative religious institutions also promote for this internalization of oppression. So how your work deal with this? And we deal with that. We directly address this. We talk about gender and we talk about empowerment and we have workshops. We have workshops for students, for faculty about gender and empowerment. We talk about the internalization of oppression and we also, one of the things that we say is like we have our own discourse and we do not allow a different discourse to be said. Like there is a discourse as you were mentioning about from the religious institutions that would say like protect her because she's like your sister, you know. And our discourse is very different. Our discourse is not that. Our discourse is she has the right to be there with no harassment. And if you harass her, it doesn't matter if you harass her, you're going to be actually indicted. It's like we've already had like 35 cases, five of which were professors that were sustained. Yeah, you need that. They were not really expelled, but one of them was suspended from work. I'm gonna move on to the next case, but thinking about this, we need to keep in mind throughout this discussion that the complexity of the concept of empowerment, we think here about empowerment and what you're looking at in the sense of electoral participation and sort of political empowerment in a gender sense. Here we have a different kind of empowerment, also relevant though to societal participation or socio-political participation, but starting with a different focus. So let's keep that in mind as we move along. It's both accountability and empowerment have these different facets. Stephanie, you wanna talk about the case of Myanmar? She asked me to emphasize that she's not for Myanmar. I told her I doubted that that was gonna be something I needed to emphasize, but she's not from the French-speaking region of Myanmar, but that's okay. We're happy to hear from you, nevertheless. So, Stephanie, please go ahead. So really this research program for us and participating into this venture is based on the motivation for us to better understand social contracts in actors. We have been working mostly on humanitarian assistance until 2011. And then we started very, very small-scale governance. We actually call them governance programs as sensitive areas of the delta in the... And the design of the program were quite traditional and that we wanted to work with local authorities like the organizations, the CDOs, a sub-national parliament for sort of the visible power holders. Started very basic public forum where citizens had an understanding of their rights, the legislation on land rights, on day or not, about right to education. And slowly, slowly accompanied by local organization, they could not stand for their rights and asking and demanding this right from local authority. And it worked. I mean, it was a five-year process, but we also wanted to work in other areas that were more contested, where the boundaries between armed groups and ethnic administration and or government, the states, were very blurry. So what does it look like and how are we translating some of our more our design of governance program into these other, more fragile or even conflict-affected states? So these research program is working alongside now an expanded social accountability program that is funded by the EU, where we're working with a donor and we're working with our partners to really do the research that the household label on. Mostly we reprioritize the third research question on trust, what is the nature of trust between citizens and different groups of citizens and these different actors, the one that they interact with as service providers on a daily basis, which can actually change on a daily basis. And the second question is more about the expectation than the experience also on a daily basis of governance with authority. And again, because we work in Rakhine, we work in Kachin, and we work in Ayodhi, in the center, the Delta, the relationship between different actors with different groups can vary not just from one state to the other but from one day to the other. So the research allows us to inform the program better, the interventions to be more adaptive and also to be better in touch with actually the experience of citizens, especially the most excluded one, with the people who have power, who really influence daily, also experience of violence and very fragmented context of where at the beginning we actually had to reframe and rethink about our research methodology and who is going to conduct the research just a few months ago where we now have to rely much more heavily on a local partner. So we, as Oxfam, we took a step back and very carefully also work with civil society organization who are going, who have the trust of the people who will be our respondent because we're going back to them every month. We are doing, we're journaling their stories of how they interact with power holders and then we aggregate this data and we analyze it through this research organization and compare it with also more of the traditional monitoring evaluation process of the program. So it's a bit of two steps ahead and sometimes three steps backward. We're very careful. We don't want to transfer risk to respondents or to even the research organization we work with. And also we reflect on what is our role as Oxfam when a lot of Myanmar people and local organization are questioning the role of international organization and of course external actors. So very, very tricky time. Let me understand, just sharpen it one step for me. Sarah talked about electoral accountability and focusing in on the question of voting participation and so forth. Mahad talked about anti-sexual harassment and empowerment and around that. You've described something more general. It sounds like governance interaction with power holders make it a little more vivid for me, a little more concrete. What kinds of interactions, what sort of issues, what sort of governance questions are you looking at? So because of the nature of the tension that are currently existing, polarization, we are very much focusing on issues of daily life of people. So it started on the ability to have services of health, education, transport, land, reclaiming land that had been confiscated by the military and able for farmers to reclaim back their land. And we are listening to the people and what issue they wanna talk about, what they're comfortable talking about and what they're comfortable demanding back to either the government or some of the non-state actors or ethnic armed group administration who provide services sometimes. And some, slowly, slowly, some organizations are sort of born from this ethnic administration and ethnic armed groups that have been de facto the power holder in some of these contested areas. And when natural resources are being, when people see that their forests, their water is being exploited for economic reasons and political reasons, they start to stand up and claiming the right back from also these sometimes very controlling and violent armed groups. Are you, all right, thank you. Are you focusing on, you mentioned the issue of trust being central to your thinking about the government's relationship between citizen and power holder. Are you focusing on trust because this is an area of conflict and sort of a deep legacy of conflict and violence? Is that why trust is of so importance, in your focus? No, definitely. And also we came with our own assumptions that if there was an elected government official, citizens would trust them. Or if there is a service provider who is also providing some level of stability and security, the communities will trust them. Or if you live in the same neighborhood or in the same state, they'll be trust between the people, but ethnic divine divide and sometimes religious divide also can shift that picture very, very quickly. And of course social media is, you know, some of this tension. Is it? Yeah. Could you just say where do you hinted at? That's an interesting question. Myanmar, it's a country that came late to the donor world in a sense because there was, I mean, there were some donor work before 2011, but it really opened up since then. Is there a curve of attitudes, understanding about the role of international actors that you've seen in communities or that are the focus of your work? Or sort of how I was thinking about the role of international community changing? It was, I was asked, I was in, Myanmar was in 2012, I was asked to give a talk to about 50 or 60 civic activists about what is the international assistance world. They must have been imprisoned during the past 10 or 15 years. They come out, they wanted to be deeply engaged in rebuilding their country or building their country's future and all these donors were appearing and, you know, the situation was like there, it was kind of a real aid rush. And the level of understanding was low, you know, about the donor world, but I saw that wasn't gonna last long that the situation was gonna change quickly. What's it like, you know, that dimension of this work here? So when I was there for almost a year in 2014, and there was, from the government side, as well as society, a massive hunger to learn very quickly and catch up with the 50 years of backwardness. So new technology, really embracing development and external actors, mostly donors, there was a really big basket of donors and hundreds of millions of dollars spent in very quick, fast-track development, were really welcome. And over the last, I would say year and two, and my colleague from Myanmar can maybe say something. There's been a lot of criticism from the international community and protect Somitian. That came also from the realization that some of the Chinese interests and the Japanese interests, private sector coming, developing these omic zones, were also going almost the extreme other opposite direction of taking away the economic wealth, but also the control and the power. So I think now there is a reaction against external actors and donors because also of the discourse and the fragmentation, but mostly the really strong criticism that media and international media and some of the very vocal personalities outside of Myanmar or don't understand the situation or biased are not listening to the media. Oh, I can imagine that. Questions for Stephanie? Yeah, here, just coming up behind you on your right. Hi, I'm John Ruth Roth, years ago with Oxfam with the Center for Democratic Education. These are excellent presentations from the different countries. The underlying issue, it seems to be his power, which Tom addressed about 10 years ago in his book, and empowerment actually has power in it. I don't think outsiders can empower local groups after power themselves, but power seems to be the key dynamic in terms of all of these pieces and having rights, having accountability, having any of that without any power, it doesn't go into those. I'm gonna take that as a comment or an observation. I don't think it requires a response, but I'd like to hear a couple more comments or questions, particularly for Stephanie. And if your colleague from Myanmar would like to say something, would you have a call on him? I don't know who it is, so I can't call. Questions? Well, then say, tell me something more about, I'm interested as a researcher working alongside in EU program like that. We all, you know, there's different forms of parallel research, action research, independent research. Tell me about the relationship of being a researcher alongside what I assume is a classic EU governance program in a sense. You can turn off the microphones and tell us what that's like. No, seriously, yeah, how is that going or what do you think the role is of the interaction between the researchers and the program? But it's an early stage. I can tell you when a microphone are off, it creates a lot of discussion internally. A lot of emails floating around. Very traditional approach to monitoring evaluation. We have collaborators who is following the lock frame and having to count beans at the end, you know, how many people attend such workshop. And then the research is very, very qualitative research that creates a lot of debates also, because each word, the reason we had to completely reframe the research questions, because each word was contested. We have a reference group that we brought together is the same for all the other countries. And basically the reference group come from NGOs and CSOs, but also some intellectual and academic. Contested the word empowerment, governance, citizenship. So that even between our local staff and our more international staff, we've seen that we were not understanding the concepts and not believing the concept in the same way. And for me, I see this, and of course, I'm comfortably sitting in Oxford. So it's easy for me to say that, to say that, but it's really positive because that forces us to talk across our little silo. You know, we've got a research unit that mostly works on advocacy and policy. We've got the program unit that works mostly with the MNE people and the more of the compliance. And now they have to work together. And we are structuring through this research program interaction on a monthly basis. We are including research or the equivalent of research question in the program officers reports on the monthly monitoring reports. And we are facilitating dialogues also with committee members with the CBOs involved in the research. So creating these spaces for learning and then adapting the program with the permission of the donor is absolutely critical. And before that, because we have to deliver activities, we have to report on milestones which we do have for this program as well. But we are creating that space across teams to really conduct a program that is relevant and it's not going to create more harm than good. Interesting, good. Okay, that completes our first tour, the first segment. Let's have a round of applause for our hard-working panel. I didn't mention they're gonna stand up past our microphones to the next three. I didn't mention, please come on up, you guys, Jonathan, John and Joy. I didn't mention we have a little reception at the end with some food and drinks, so please hang on, stick around. Some good things are coming and these next people are gonna be good too. So just stand up and pass your microphones to them. It's just gonna take us a minute here. And I'll also mention while they're changing places that we have a video unit outside in the reception area and they're pulling some people out from the audience to make videos after the event, they're going to ask several of you to make short video interviews. And so that's, just so you know that's going on as well. Jonathan, you wanna come on up? Yeah, John, you wanna come on up, sit down? John, go ahead, is it here? Enjoy there. Oh, just hold this? Yeah, yeah. Let's put Joy in there. Go ahead, there, good. Okay, thanks. That's fine, that's fine. Thanks, that's fine. Okay, we're gonna go right into the second segment now. Before we get into the discussion, I wanna give Jonathan Fox just a minute to introduce the Accountability Research Center. It's chosen a nice acronym. I'm sure you thought a lot about that. I didn't notice it fits into your logo there, ARC. So Jonathan, tell us about the new center. So we're an action research incubator based at American University at the School of International Service and one reason that we exist is to help to address some of the gaps in the field and I would argue that one of the reasons for the gaps in the field is that the action strategists, the people who are actually doing the work to try to build accountability have not had enough of a seat at the table where a lot of the big decisions get made, especially the decisions about what are the research questions that will actually get funded and what are the initiatives that will get funded to do the action. So essentially we wanna step back and encourage a reboot in the field so that more voices can be heard, especially those who are taking the risks and who know their context so well. Great, and do you already have a sort of a network of researchers in different places? Are you building that or tell me a little bit more how it's gonna proceed? We are building that. We have a series of partnerships. We've got some materials outside. We've got a dozen partnerships already. You can see details on the website. I enjoy Aceron as one of our advisors and one of our partners in the Philippines. Walter here, Walter Flores from Guatemala and back is another one of our core partners and so we've been working together for a couple of years now in what we can no longer call a soft launch. Okay, so it just officially became a hard launch just now I think. So well, good luck with the enterprise. Thank you. Yeah. All right, let's move to a more general discussion. I want you all to take part in this as well and let's reflect a little bit on the state of the empowerment accountability field. Some of you and I know the panelists took part, the bank had its big global partnership for social accountability forum this week in Washington so it's kind of accountability week in Washington. I was glad that we had the results of some of the investigation here in Washington on Monday just to highlight the accountability theme in our own country. I thought it was well timed with the GPSA. And so there's been a lot of talk about accountability that started not to come away from a World Bank meaning kind of swimming in terms and wondering like, what does it all mean, John? Are we making progress? Is this another buzzword that we'll look back on in five to 10 years and say, well, that was fun and now we're on to the next thing or is this something real happening here? Tell me a bit about yours, if we had a drink or two. Tell us a bit of your thoughts. Well, I said this last year when I came to the GPSA. At my age, it takes you back a bit. And I remember first being in the same room in the World Bank in 1998, where a big gathering of civil society and other talking about PRSPs and participation in the bank agenda and then coming back almost 20 years later and hearing about accountability and the word participation has gone and asking myself, have we made progress? And I did a blog on that last year and gave the closing speech. And similarly, I found myself having a series of Dave Javuz because I've been in lots of conferences recently on accountability. And actually, the more I've thought about it, I actually think we have made some progress. And at least three areas. One is when we first started using the word accountability, it was to try to bring some teeth to the work on participation, to use Jonathan's word. Back then, 20 years ago, we were writing about voice over here and other people were writing about responsiveness over here and we hadn't put the two together. And I think the people working in this field now realize that actually it's not either or. We've got to bring the two together. You can strengthen empowered voices and not get any response and that's frustrating. You can have a claim for responsiveness but actually responding to the wrong voices. We've got to put them together. And in putting the together, we know we have to work both sides of the equation. It's not simply strengthening civil society voice and then you expect response from authorities. The work's gone beyond that to talk about accountability coalitions, accountability hybrids. It's not either or, that's really important. And 20 years ago, we were saying, let's try this local experiment. Let's experiment with something like a report card or a different form of participation. Now we've moved way beyond the tools kind of debate to recognize that tools have to be embedded in broader forms of social and political action. And we have rather than a few examples, we have hundreds and thousands of examples that have emerged over that period of time. We can build a body of knowledge. But there's still some old plaguing problems that I find every time I come to these things. One is, as your work has pointed out, everybody can agree on this notion of accountability because we all have different understandings of what it means and who it's for. And if you talk about accountability for efficiency, to save money, one set of people would come around that. If you talk to plug the leaky pipes of aid, that's one thing. If you talk about accountability for realization of human rights or for deepening democracy, that's gonna bring you another set of conversations. And so as soon as you start digging deeper to say accountability for what and for whom, the consensus breaks apart. And at the heart of that consensus that breaks apart is the question that in the middle of accountability is power and power relations. And we oftentimes evade the question of how do you build accountability between citizens and authorities, whoever they are, in situations of highly unequal power relations without talking about transforming power. And that's, as Walter would say in others, that's often the elephant in the room. And I felt that very strongly at the GPSA here because even though the WDR last year talks about law and governance and puts power, brings in a power framework, fantastic. It answers that by saying we can address power by talking about the three C's of consensus and commitment and coordination. And I wondered, where's conflict? If you have difference of interest and difference of power, can we really address accountability without dealing with difficult subjects? And then those questions become all the more important in the kind of work we're doing and that the kind of received theory of change, this neat theory that I think has emerged that has been pretty well debunked but is still informing a lot of donors is that accountability is simply a process of strengthening voice over here and then you get some response over here and then you get a better outcome. We know it's very complicated and it's particularly complicated in these settings where fear and violence affect who speaks and who's able to speak, where fragmentation of authorities, as we've heard, means that it's not about strengthening voice to the state, it may be strengthening voice to the militia and what does that mean? Where the outcomes that really matter may not be, in fact, service delivery, it may just be protecting your life in a given situation. So I think we've learned a lot over 20 years but there's a lot we don't know in some of the enduring questions but we call it IDS to who questions. Whose voice for whose interests and whose power remains still critical. One question for you that I want to turn to Joy to get her perspective and we'll come to the audience and then it is, I was listening to the three case studies and thinking about you have five, I was thinking to myself it's almost about 50 to begin to get all the different facets of this topic. Do you feel five is enough to make a dent in it? This isn't a pitch for more money. No, but seriously this topic is resistant to any comprehensive approach in a way because as you say there's just so many different initiatives sitting in a GPSA forum with the 300 or 400 people there, 200 of whom are in their title account of the voting network in this country working on this. I was just overwhelmed with the sense of how do we get our arms analytically even around this topic. I have sense to know that it all in a sense under this word accountability has some meaning and sort of sense of four projects that we're all working on. It's a huge challenge. Our work's very exploratory at this stage. We began by, we're working in five countries and those five countries we're right now have 15 projects along the four themes that Anu mentioned around understanding meanings of expressions through governance daries that was mentioned. Myanmar, we're doing that in two other countries and some other approaches. Looking at pathways to accountability in different settings, looking at different struggles of women's for social and political action. So for instance in Nigeria we're doing an interesting case study to bring back our girls' campaign and what we've learned from that. But that's just the type of tip of the iceberg. And to a bit of a, sometimes the donors are a bit uncomfortable with this process. We're saying we want to start with some cases that have been identified as relevant in people's own context. Do those and out of those see if we can evolve a more higher level set of questions and theory of change and then be a bit more systematic. One thing that I think we've learned here this week and it's fantastic is while there has been all this work on empowerment and accountability over the years, the topic of what it really means in context of rap fragility and violence and conflict which we realize are increasing everywhere, not just in the usual suspect countries. That topic I think people realize is new and really important. And we've seen now emerging a number of big research programs that are beginning to look at this and we just had a meeting at lunch to talk about how can we start bringing together the new thinking in this area. All the more important because the kinds of things you're working on is five or six years ago in the context of voice and accountability, you realize there are certain settings but now the issue of closing space for civil society to exercise any voice is something we're facing across the world and the ability of control of social media to actually change the notion of what voices mean and to fill those voices in social media spaces with misogyny and hate speech and to manipulate our voices with algorithms and algorithms and we're really dealing in a very different world that affects every society as we, and so I think there's a huge amount of research to be done just to the tip of the iceberg but there are some exciting programs going on out there. Joe, I'd like to have you reflect on the same question. You come from maybe a morse. John's a polymath, worked in a lot of different places. I know you have some too, but you- I've been called lots of names. Right, yeah, that's one of the worst, but you're more perhaps specific national reference with the Philippines, but in the Philippines has been a garden of accountability and empowerment for 30 years. The number of international workshops and conferences are in there and there's some Philippine NGO leader who's just fantastic and talks about the Philippines. We used to call it NGO Paradise for a while. Wasn't always a compliment, sometimes it was. Conics, sometimes it was a compliment, but can you reflect on the same question but maybe in your own way, in your own experiences? Well, the Philippines is quite an interesting case indeed, reflecting on these issues because we've come from a long history of citizen action. We're the first country that have successfully undertaken a peaceful people power and in the previous administration, we thought we pushed the boundaries of transparency, participation, accountability agenda and in the hope of really seeing difference in conditions of lives of people and the way power is exercised in the space. So now that we seem to be in a 180 degree situation where the consensus on human rights and democracy is even being questioned is up for debate in the country. From the top down to citizen level, that's a big puzzle where did we go wrong or what did we miss in our effort to affect social change? So this has been a process over. Few people in the United States are asking themselves. The thing is, yeah, I don't know if anybody's even asking that. Well, something that I noticed about the field of citizen action for a time now is, I think, same as was mentioned. We're asking the same question and the answer seems to be there 10, 15, 20 years ago, but we are seeing the same practice. So I don't know if we've failed to learn or if we are not learning and I'm not talking about adaptive or really learning in terms of how we are approaching the problem and solving the problem. I wonder, it has something to do with the distance between the analysis of the problem, the kind of research, the empirical evidence that are being put forward and the kind of action and solutions and the actors that are actually moving, that divorce and that distance, very practical in terms of spaces, in terms of relationships and also in terms of, in many levels, the difference of that, the distance of analysis in action and solution seems to be the reason for it that I feel we are trying to respond to. If you go to the grassroots and you talk to people, they know the solutions and you'll be fascinated by what we are saying as answers to the questions here are actually very much similar to how they think they can solve the problem, but it's a question of, again, capacity and power. Do they have the capacity really to undertake the kind of actions that they want to undertake? And I notice also, and I've undertaken many, many forms of citizen action starting from youth student action to supporting a presidential candidate to civil society action to academic research and different sort of actions to actually push for reforms. And whenever I hear, and I totally agree with Professor John that we've already improved in terms of discourse, we've broadened the agenda. It's, and you're seeing organizations like World Bank that are tackling the issue of power. But whenever that is discussed, it seemed like the people discussing it is distancing themselves from that agenda. I mean, talking about power and putting that forward as a solution to some of the problems that we're facing. So how do we really build power? If there are problems that being faced at the country level, at the national, at the local levels, what are the roles? And I feel like whenever I push that in certain spaces, maybe people seem to be not ready to start building people-to-people coalitions and alliances, and there's always that fear that maybe we're stepping on partisanship or maybe we should not meddle, all these complications that are keeping us really as a community to build power, to come together and respond to problems that we keep on speaking about and studying about. So I think that's one of the things, yeah. It's a good segue into Jonathan. Jonathan, you've done some pathbreaking thinking and writing about the question of strategic action on accountability as opposed to tactical action, but I'd like you to reflect a bit on the same question. You're starting the center, so you've obviously given some thought to the state of the field and sort of where is it, both in research terms and in action and where are we and what, looking forward to that, where, what should we be thinking of this as next steps? On the research side, one of the constraints is that a lot of the most prominent research in the field is research that's focused specifically on interventions and that's largely because the money is with the big donors who want their interventions to be studied or they want the questions they're interested in to be studied, but one of the points of departure of this particular research project is we wanna disentangle the question of the theory of change, how does accountability get constructed in very inhospitable environments? What are the pathways? We wanna distinguish that from theories of action which involve a specific focus on what role can specific actors, including external actors, play to support that broader theory of change and one of the problems with a conventional agenda is that those two ideas are conflated, that people are talking really about the theory of action but they're calling it the theory of change. So there may or may not be a connection between the pathway and what external actors are willing to fund and what kind of studies they're willing to, so there's still a huge lag in terms of the effervescence in the area of the multiple initiatives that pro-accountability forces are pursuing, big gap between that world and what actually gets studied and published in referee journals and is considered legitimate evidence by economists at the World Bank for example and so forth. So we have a disconnect there and within that context, even though, as John was mentioning, the idea that voice and teeth should come together is increasingly accepted and people talk about it in terms of closing the feedback loop but there still is I think a lack of will to tackle the hard power question. So for example, we're part of Arc's role within this broader consortium is to look at the World Bank citizen engagement framework which on paper sounds very enlightened and they made the commitment to build beneficiary feedback into 100% of the investment projects with so-called identifiable beneficiaries but what does this actually mean in practice? It turns out that for a project to appear to have complied with this commitment, the bar is quite low. They just have to say, well, we'll have a beneficiary survey four years in so the feedback loop can't possibly close or we'll promise to have agreements to address mechanism but it actually it only exists in the form of an email address buried in the middle of an operational manual that's not actually available to the public and is not in the national language. So we have basically accountability washing if you will and it turns out that those kinds of projects that have the most promising potential entry points for citizen engagement are the projects that have triggered the World Bank safeguard policies, the social environmental policies that exist thanks to 40 years of protest and advocacy and within the World Bank institutional context of the safeguard policies actually have some modest teeth some would argue it's just gums but more than the citizen engagement framework that's for sure and so those are the areas where there might be some entry points but at the same time that those within the bank who are involved whose job it is to defend the safeguards are totally different from those whose job it is to promote the citizen engagement. They have their own internal collective action problem and so the whole is not yet greater than the sum of the part. So I still see a lot of distance between a certain acceptance of a more sophisticated discourse and actual institutional practices that might make a difference through creating enabling environments for people to not only exercise voice but for that voice to be heard by institutions with a capacity to respond. One introduction we'll come back to all three of you I want to hear from some of you and I ask questions I'm looking around Brian Levy given a lot of thought to change and formerly at the bank and now researcher Brian maybe you the fellow from the accountability labs obviously organizations thinking a lot of them Eric Brinkerhoff who's also done a lot of writing on this I don't mean to disguise but National Democratic Institute who does a lot of work on civic engagement to hear from some of you about where you think the field is and how you react to some of the things you heard or whatever's on your mind Brian you're never at a loss for words. So I can call on you. I've struggled with it because I thought that was the same to a conversation. And it worries me, you know it worries me. What's the subject and what's the verb? Subject is whoever it is, is verb is more empowerment. Object is out. And so that troubles me because it troubles me because there are discourses that can endlessly be comfortable, comforting, the powerful. One concrete example which is instrumental but it could be it needed me. I was thinking about schooling which happened to be about the issue of accessibility. And so there we can have a narrative around empowerment and goals access to school but then look at the data which tells us that you spend, say that boys, let's say it's a setting where schooling is. Boys go to school and after five years there's no literacy. What's the object? Is the object going to school where there is essentially a network of patronage anyway? One of these areas and it just left me uncomfortable. That's a bit inchoate but you put me on the spot. No, thanks. No, no, I can count on you for some original thinking. And either you want to come back and distract me here with some more. John, or Jonathan. Go ahead. On that particular issue, there's been a lot of work on, as you know, on learning outcomes and not only the recent WDR but a lot of work supported by private foundations to encourage taking a harder look and trying to disentangle school enrollment from where they're learning is happening and the agenda has not gotten very far. I think partly because the what to do about the problem has yet to generate a consensus. The UNESCO recently put out the Global Education Monitor on Accountability and Education and it actually has an approach that's quite different from the World Bank because it's actually acknowledging the many different moving parts, the many different accountability relationships acknowledged to be power relationships. It brings in a range of issues that have been excluded from the conventional learning outcome agenda like anti-corruption and the rule of law and maybe teachers unions can make a positive contribution and don't put all the blame on them. They don't have control over much of the learning outcomes and so forth. A lot of the talk about research on those teachers is actually not accurate. So there's an alternative set of perspective that has just been put on the table by a multilateral institution that's not currently in favor in this town, but there is I think a need for a much broader focus than has been the case so far when we look at learning outcomes and access to pools. John, you want to comment on this too? Well, I think it's a critical question. I was hinting at it by saying we've got to ask the question accountability for what. And I also think that many of us have worked in this space for a long time and Joe and I were talking, we've seen places where we built lots more processes, brought lots more voices in, created all these kinds of ways of participating and we're pretty disappointed by the outcomes because we see regressive, what we would consider the same time regressive political outcomes, not just in the US and the UK, but in the places we thought were winning Brazil, Philippines, and we thought we could see progress. And I think that means that to me, I talk about the three sort of phases of accountability work. One was the sort of, the accountability was about tools and Jonathan reminded us it's not about that, it's about strategies and politics. But now I think we've really got to build a normative debate of accountability for what? For what values? For what kind of society are we trying to create? Because if we don't, we will create the processes and they'll be filled with values that we don't support. And that's the biggest challenge I think we've got to talk about which is why the work in Egypt is saying accountability is just a process. It's about a norm of zero tolerance against women. And that's what we're using the tool to get to that norm. Or in Pakistan the norm is women have a right to vote because when they vote, interest we think will change towards different kinds of service delivery. So we can't be shy in talking about what's the vision of society we want out of all this. Sorry, thanks Jonathan. It's a little bit like the debate Duncan Green carried on in his blog last year about his book, How Change Happens? Like you wrote a review that unsettled him though. So nice job, Brian. Is How Change Happens had a question mark about change? There was an assumption that sort of, we all know what we mean by change and we share a vision, but it was very blank. Sort of as though there's a consensus on change and suddenly we look at societies like the UK or the US going in directions that are unexpected and disturbing to at least many people. And to say, wait a minute, where was the vision? Was there a sort of a natural assumption that we just focus on change and participation processes, et cetera, and we'll get there. So I think we're talking about something that's connected both to developments in Western democracies, but further afield. But I think it's where this whole field has come up to the water's edge of this deeper. Bringing in some more, I also forgot to single out, I'm not going to go size to some other people. I want to put pressure on, but yeah, sir. My name is Mohammed Yasin, I forgot to introduce myself last time. I work here with Forum for Use Investment. I work a lot regarding use involvement in accountability process and participation process. My question regarding disappointment because disappointment in fragile situation or countries with fragility, we tend to avoid dealing with head and bower because there is a lot of limitations, there is a lot of fear, there is a lot of violence and we keep working with invited spaces, invited space for us to work. And I feel this is a kind of consensus. This is a way we should work in this fragile context. I'd like to double check that. And if that's yes, I'm not feeling like surprised, we are disappointed. Thank you. Okay, yeah. Yeah, Joy, do you want to comment on that? Invited spaces versus non-invited spaces? In the Philippines, this term constructive engagement became quite popular. And for a time, I think it's premised on, you know, some assumption on where the state should go and that the assumption is that you want to bring people closer to the state and you want people to reclaim the state. So there is this proactive engagement. But the recent development in the country has shown that if you try to build trust in the state, it could be possible that this gets turned into a blind obedience to a state that is no longer democratic or not proud to be serving human rights. And I think now we are even sensing that maybe we've unlearned contentious politics or we're in the process and have actually just become quite comfortable in spaces where the state is consenting citizen action. That the state is actually allowing people's participation and that the other forms are even just a combination of the different strategies. Maybe we've lost it somehow. And the reason why is still a puzzle. But that is a debate now. I mean, even in spaces such as open government partnership, it's a debate whether it should be pushed to start being a space to discuss contentious issues, such as human rights violations or should it just be a space for constructive engagement? Other, my colleagues in civil society would say that this is not just what we are doing, constructive engagement, we are also doing other things in advocacies. But your time and resources are limited. So if you look at where people are actually devoting their time and resources, given the many demands of doing constructive engagement by donor partners, you will end up really leaving out a lot of other facets of citizen action. And that is limiting the kind of political clout. So I guess now that's one of the things that we are looking at. I mean, how do you really enable civil society to do multiple strategies and multiple approaches that can traverse different approach doing constructive engagement with its needed or when it's maybe the appropriate response or using constructive engagement, using contentious politics or pressure politics if needed. So in the paper we wrote, Prof. Chattano and I, we are putting it as the synergy of monitoring and advocacy. But it's actually that, which is at the bottom of it that using multiple approaches and tactics, yes. I want to hear from some more people out here and then I'm going to come back to some issues. I was just thinking how great the distance is between beneficiary feedback and contentious politics. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, but let's think about that. Derek, can you introduce yourself there? I'm Derek Mingerhoff with RTI International. I kind of have a foot in both the world of practice and the world of research and end up feeling kind of schizophrenic at times. And picking up on some of what Jonathan is saying, I think one of the issues is I think accountability has become the new version of governance. And with the disappointment around the third wave of democracy and all of that, I think people are now looking to accountability as the next magic bullet for these kinds of things. And even within USATES DRG Center, they tend to talk about PETA, participation, inclusion, transparency and accountability rather than governance because in a way I think it's been somewhat discredited. But I think the way that AID has approached this and I think to some extent the bank, I was also at the GPSA meetings, is to instrumentalize accountability in terms of relation to a set of concrete outcomes. And so the talk is, how does governance get integrated into sectors? And so that gives you a different set of metrics. So instead of looking at the kinds of things that were talked about here around power and empowerment and rights and all, it gets around, well, what was the health outcome that came about as a result of that accountability intervention or that education outcome? And so in a way, we're even farther away from sort of the power dynamics even as donors are talking about political economy analysis, thinking and working politically, all the stuff that you were writing about in the almost revolution book. So I think it's this weird schizophrenia around the research agenda and the practical agenda. And I was also struck at the GPSA yesterday, how many of the grantees were very willing to cast themselves as partners with government rather than as opponents or monitors or watchdogs. And I've seen that in some of the work that I've done in terms of projects. Citizens are often not very comfortable with those roles for some of the reasons, particularly in the fragile state's environment, that it's dangerous. And it's a lot more comfortable to be seen as a partner than it is to be seen as a watchdog and an opponent. Good, let's take Smart, yes, right here. Then I'll come to you in the back. I'll come to you, Walter, yeah. Marta from the Columbia School of Public Health, and I just want to piggyback on Derek's question because I think something that happens is not only do the outcomes get instrumentalized, but the groups that are addressing these get instrumentalized. And I think especially in the context of closing civil society space, some of the groups who've been working on the ground for a long time were maybe the best hope for thinking more transformationally about what accountability means are being limited in their ability, especially those who are dependent on international donors. And I wonder if the folks on the panel have any perspective on that, particularly in light of I think all of you saying that there's been some progress on the sort of level of global level discourse, what it might look like from the perspective of those working on the ground, how their experiences have changed. Take one more, then I'm gonna come back to you. Walter in the back there, yeah. Oh, my name is Walter Flores. When we start to apply the power lens to accountability, we identify the accountability in itself has many limitations. If we want to address historical inequalities and historical social exclusion. For instance, we work in Guatemala with indigenous population rights. And one of the rights that they have been fighting for over a century is land, which it was taken out of them over 150 years ago so Europeans can grow coffee. So they have been telling us the social movements digital for land saying that if we demand accountability, which is basically rule of law, it's actually accepting that we have no claiming over this land. So for us, the man in accountability is accepting that the current rule of law and the situation is unfair that has been coming on for over 50 years. So for us, it is not useful. So they say what we need is a new change of power relation between society and members of all of that. So for them, which is very interesting for them, pushing for accountability in the man in rule of law is actually working against the man which is more than a century old. So I would like if you can comment about this that we should be aware also the accountability we have limitations. If we are addressing in context with historical exclusion, marginalization and unfairness that instead of helping maybe just working against those having this very long while claim. Thank you, Walter. I need some reactions. Jonathan and John haven't heard from you. Well, I think the underlying problem is that accountability failures if we think of accountability broadly in terms of governments and private actors who are responsive to citizens and rights. Those accountability failures are often systemic failures and the solutions that most big donors are willing to fund, for example, are not systemic alternatives. They're tinkering at the edges. They're depoliticized. They involve at best pushing for accountability with one arm tied behind your back. And why would we expect marginal incremental approaches to be able to tackle systemic problems? Now, one could also argue at the same time that in fragile and conflict settings where there is barely a minimum of freedom of association at the most micro level that even the most modest opportunities for free spaces in unfree places could be necessary but not sufficient for the emergence of social actors that could eventually become political actors and so forth. One could argue that it's in those sessions, in those contexts, those settings where external actors could play the most positive role. But the vast bulk of what actually gets funded externally, I think it remains non-strategic, remains incremental, and therefore fundamentally superficial. So why would we expect it to make a big difference as the rock keeps rolling back down the hill? Ouch. John, I'm looking at Mr. Working with the Grain over here, Brian Levy, title of his last book. So I'm gonna call, come back to you, Brian. Yeah, so, John. I mean, I concur, especially with Jonathan's point. Somebody, the GPSA, said, well, there's all this talk here about accountability to rebuild relations with the state, but we don't wanna build relations with that state. The state fundamentally failed us. We don't understand a state that will support us. Why do we want to have that kind of accountability? And I did a blog recently and I just looked at it, remind myself what I said about the history of accountability and it was a very good comment back and said accountability becomes a distraction in many of these settings because we're trying to work on accountability relations for and within an unjust system. And so in my mind, accountability discourse can provide openings in certain cases for people to begin to make claims and access funds, but accountability is not an end in itself. So it comes, the end is something bigger. And I, when we think about the question of invited spaces, well, you've been to IDS, do you know what we say about that? That simply, you will not get accountability simply by inviting people into our donor constructed, government constructed space because power enters that space as well. Those spaces only work when both sides of the invitation are held open by people mobilizing out in the streets, which will keep that invited space honest. And when you find champions on the inside who are also tugging to keep it open on the governmental side. And so what Joey says, we've got to find strategies that are finding those claim spaces like we're trying to do in this work where people are using their own ways of, you know, we're looking at graffiti and cultural expressions of resistance in Mozambique as an accountability construction because those are the voices where people who don't feel able to go into those invites are really expressing their demands around government. So how many donors, and the donor's questioning why are we doing that, right? But it's finding those places where voice people are expressing their demands for themselves outside of the spaces that we know and figuring out how we grow them rather than how we invite them into our space. But finally, in all of this, the thing that I've been, you know, in addition to this question of what's accounted before and what's one of the norms we want to talk about, I think there's two other questions that really bother me. One is how do we do this in regressive times? We brought together our group that a year ago had started in these five countries and even then we realized we naively thought if we could just find those hidden voices and amplify them sometime, we would get some change. In every one of the five countries we're working in, the spaces have closed so fast and the regression of progressive voices has been so strong. We're having to re-examine our optimism, as you say, when the sort of notion of a liberal governance or democracy itself is that question. And so question is how do we do this work in regressive times? Not how do we do it as a form of progress for building governance? That's the critical question. And how do we do it? Because this never, we don't seem to link these two together. I just engaged and I was co-edited to the recent World Social Science Report on global inequality. And we look at seven forms of inequality. I won't bore them all, but one is the relationship between economic inequality and political inequality. So how, and somebody who's worked on participation for 40 years, I've increasingly began to feel that every time we try to strengthen people's voice, we are trumped ultimately by the power associated with economic inequality. Because the economic power we're always spending in vast extreme inequalities we have, the economic power will speak more loudly than the voices we're mobilizing. And so until we can start bringing economic relationships into this consideration about strengthening voice and accountability, we'll be playing on the edges of where real power exists. And that's what you're reminding us of when you talk about accountability and land rights, accountability of multinationals, accountability of the economic elites, accountability of the super rich. We've got to bring the economic arena somehow into this conversation. Or there's a great book a few years ago, the title is great, I hope nobody here has wrote it, but it was called The Democratization of Disempowerment. And in a way we're sounding that too, we're having the accountableization of over less and less, which is distracting us from the fact that real restructuring of resources are going into fewer and fewer hands. And we aren't addressing that in this agenda yet. We have just five to 10 minutes. We're gonna finish a little before 5.30 so we get to the reception. I have Erin Hazelton like to come in and I would like to come back to you, Brian, and maybe one or two others, then we'll finish up. So stay with us, Erin. Just introduce yourself formally to the group. Yeah, good afternoon. I'm Erin Hazelton with the National Committee. I appreciate the work the panelists have done and have followed. What I would ask is, are there any methods to get at some of the issue by trying to achieve a different type of coverage? And also, what's the role of how civil society can engage with parties? And your elections aren't often mentioned either as an entry point. Thanks, Aaron. Brian, wanna come back? There's a microphone right there behind you today. I mean, it's again the account. One of the things that I've done in the last while is I've gone back to Hirschman. Hirschman wrote about exactly this moment of this illusion in the night. And what strikes me as one way to think of where we were and where we are is we were in a space where there seemed to be a question is, how does one nudge momentum in inclusive direction? And a participatory approach to working with the grain is one way to do that. Now in a space where fundamental questions of legitimacy are at stake and in a sense, power asymmetries as in a sense bringing grinding processes to a halt. And the question now becomes a somewhat different one. And I think that's why the question in this time now puts this question, the answer of accountability for what in this time brings us more towards vision than nudging. So at least that's where I come out. And that's very much the space that Hirschman probes in the 70s. Thanks, Brian. That's an interesting comment. That's one of my sequel reports. I was just thinking that actually. It's like a nice bookend. You say it's just 10 years in between and so much has changed or however many years we might end up. One last comment if anyone else. I'm gonna turn back to our panelists for final comments. Okay, no, I know it's just hesitating but just briefly, yeah, go ahead. Right here it goes, yeah. Not related to obviously our research program but one of the things that I think we're trying to do in the research but the issue is that we're still slightly stuck in the state society framing problem. And we need to get away from that in situations not just in the fragility. So many actors and the legitimacy of the actors and the sources of these legitimacy. How you ask for accountability. Yeah, good. Just final, just one minute each from each of you. I think we're close to the end here but I'd like to give you guys a chance. Joy, you wanna go first? So just quick response to some of the questions. I think one thing that is keeping us from moving forward is that the other side, those forces that do not want accountability, transparency, participation are also learning faster and better than us so it's good to take note of that. Second point is that accountability is a good frame for me and I've seen that when I talk to communities it's also good if you use it as a way of responding to power and if you make them, if you understand power as a product of history and you pin down who holds power that has to be accountable for the issues and problems that you're confronting, it becomes proper. So even social injustice could be part of that, part of the discourse and it gives some handle also for citizens because that already gives a response, accountability, how you hold power to account. The third point is, I think we are being pulled to go back to basics of this work. Obviously the work that we're doing is supposedly a response or a solution to the problems but now we are trying to solve, we are trying to improve or solve the solutions to the problem. And there's a lot of thinking that needs to be done in terms of how do we go back to the basics and really respond to practicalities. I think how we are not moving from what our assumptions are to the outcomes really because of the practicalities, the very basic, you cannot imagine how the basics are but these are some of the things that need to be looked into, the relationship of actors, even how donors, grantees, how community organizing are being done, obviously basic institutions such as elections and parties must be strengthened but the reality is, and we've been doing that as well, the reality is you need a constituency and the people are very alienated from this institution so that's the reason we thought social accountability could help if you can connect it to reforms of basic institutions to create a constituency but that would require really, again, basics, organizing, education and if you look at support of international community and the donor community on this, it hasn't really been the kind of support for community organizing that was in the past when we were, say, fighting the dictatorship or when we were still starting the democratization process. This is really so much projectized, fragmented, very time-bound support that is being provided by donors. Again, practicalities that are affecting how social movements are actually organizing and going beyond that, I think thinking of more sustainable way of addressing this and not relying on donors would be one of the challenges and the questions that must be grappled with by social forces on the ground. I can't help but mention this, so it's unpleasant but the most chilling paragraph I ever read in an aid document, something I was looking at, I think it was, I don't have the exact, I think it was 1972, the United States had been doing a lot of work on community organizing in Central America, it was the thing in the 60s, part of the Hirschman era. The paragraph said, we carried out this program of training community organizers in Guatemala. Unfortunately, once it said 640 of the organizers were killed, subsequent to taking part in the training. That was just, there was the document, unfortunate. You know, and so this question of power and change and organizing, this isn't new. This is something you go back to at the start of the development enterprise and there. It's a thread running through everything that's been done. Final comments, you've already sort of had almost what sounded like final comments, but let me, Jonathan in the middle of it to have the last word, Jonathan. Tom, since you mentioned that example, it raises the issue of first doing no harm from the point of view of external actors. So here was one part of the US government, funding one pro people initiative in Guatemala and what was the rest of the US government doing with the rest of the Guatemalan state where the guns used to kill them and paid for by US tax dollars, right? And that's an issue today. When we look at the role of the US in kleptocracies around the world, we have the magnificent work of Sarah Chase here at Carnegie who works on kleptocracies who looks at, essentially gives us a framework for looking at the net effect of USA. The US might be doing one thing over here another thing over there and essentially the big picture, the support for the security apparatus may be canceling out overcoming the more positive and well-intended stuff the US is doing somewhere else. So this is a new report that Carnegie published on Honduras and provides a very powerful case that the net effect of the US in particular is not pro-accountability. So we need to take that to heart as we think about what kinds of accountability strategies might make a difference and keep the big picture in mind. John, finally? Well, two thoughts. We've all known that discourse changes rapidly in development and in the 90s it was participation and then it is governance and now it's accountability. We need to be thinking strategically about what next because for me all these words are simply moments in time that we navigate our way through in order to build a bigger agenda. My work on power is once challenged by some activist and said John, you've left out all your forms of power you've left out the most important form of power and I said what's that? They said staying power. And staying power is the ability to navigate across this, well the will power is there across these changing discourse and I think we need to be thinking about what next so I think this accountability bubble is going to be shifting. And secondly is that the whole challenge of what do we do in the closing times and the regressive times. And Brian, I think what you said is really important. Before I moved to IDS I worked in this country for many years at a place called the Highlander Center that many of you may know. It's been now a 85 year old institution as a training ground for civil rights and other activists in the American South. And it was famous because it was the place where Rosa Parks got her training allegedly and a famous for its work in the civil rights movement before that the labor movement. And we always under huge pressure because we expected every workshop we did to produce the next movement and it didn't. And so we used to go to our founder Miles Horton who lived a long time and was a mentor and he said actually the most important work our center did wasn't in the 10, it's known for over 70 years, it's known for its work, 10 years of work. The most important and he called those the peaks, the peaks of the movement. And that's what we all strive for but the most important work was what it did in the valleys. What it did in between times is to think about new formations and alternatives to power in small scale and gradually link them up to something that could become bigger when the time became right. And I kind of feel that we're going into a valley period from some of the peak of excitement about pro-social movements and opening societies. And we need to be thinking very strategically about where the small scale alternative expressions that we can gradually build. We're actually making them visible at the peak at this moment in time, maybe the fastest way to kill them. We need to work quietly in the trenches and develop alternatives and quietly link them together. Dunstan, I'd like to wish the Accountability Research Center all success. I'd like to also wish action for empowerment and accountability. And if you're interested in most of these you can sign up outside for our meeting list. Yeah. And thank our hard-working panelists and thank all of you. We do have a reception just out there behind us so please join us for a drink and some food. Thank you.