Political leaders and institutions across the Global South are continually failing to respond to the needs of their citizens. This incisive book sets out to establish the pathways to and outcomes of accountability in a development context, as well as to investigate the ways in which people can seek redress and hold their public officials to account.
This book examines the problem of accountability in two African political systems, South Africa and Nigeria. Despite the principle of separation of powers and the doctrine of checks and balances among the institutions of governance, a burgeoning governance crisis stifles the potential of accountability and good governance. Legislative oversight in the two countries remains largely ineffective while citizens are left to face the consequences of the mismanagement of public resources by political elites. This book critically assesses how the legislative institutions in South Africa and Nigeria have been unable to harness the requisite constitutional powers to ensure accountability in government and explores the feasibility of their effectiveness. The book begins with a comparative analysis of the principles, tradition, and powers associated with legislative capability in South Africa and Nigeria. The chapters explore constitutional provisions and analyze the capacity of each legislature to function within its respective political environment. The book also examines the process and challenges associated with the various measures and mechanisms available for legislatures to ensure accountability in the two countries. Researchers, scholars and students of African politics will find this book useful in their understanding of the problems associated with the simmering governance crisis in South Africa and Nigeria.
There is growing recognition of the need for new approaches to the ways in which donors support accountability, but no broad agreement on what changed practice looks like. This publication aims to provide more clarity on the emerging practice.
In many low and middle income countries, dismal failures in the quality of public service delivery such as absenteeism among teachers and doctors and leakages of public funds have driven the agenda for better governance and accountability. This has raised interest in the idea that citizens can contribute to improved quality of service delivery by holding policy-makers and providers of services accountable. This proposition is particularly resonant when it comes to the human development sectors health, education and social protection which involve close interactions between providers and citizens/users of services. Governments, NGOs, and donors alike have been experimenting with various social accountability tools that aim to inform citizens and communities about their rights, the standards of service delivery they should expect, and actual performance; and facilitate access to formal redress mechanisms to address service failures. The report reviews how citizens individually and collectively can influence service delivery through access to information and opportunities to use it to hold providers both frontline service providers and program managers accountable. It focuses on social accountability measures that support the use of information to increase transparency and service delivery and grievance redress mechanisms to help citizens use information to improve accountability. The report takes stock of what is known from international evidence and from within projects supported by the World Bank to identify knowledge gaps, key questions and areas for further work. It synthesizes experience to date; identifies what resources are needed to support more effective use of social accountability tools and approaches; and formulates considerations for their use in human development. The report concludes that the relationships between citizens, policy-makers, program managers, and service providers are complicated, not always direct or easily altered through a single intervention, such as an information campaign or scorecard exercise. The evidence base on social accountability mechanisms in the HD sectors is under development. There is a small but growing set of evaluations which test the impact of information interventions on service delivery and HD outcomes. There is ample space for future experiments to test how to make social accountability work at the country level.
This book brings together jurisprudential debates on international criminal law, international law scholarship on the limits of state sovereignty, and applied political philosophy concerning responsibility and accountability in the context of mass political crimes and state criminality. It offers a compelling view of legal reasoning concerning accountability regimes in the Global South. No other study addresses questions of ethical dimensions of mass crimes and accountability for state criminality.
To what extent should the doctrine of the separation of powers evolve in light of recent shifts in constitutional design and practice? Constitutions now often include newer forms of rights – such as socioeconomic and environmental rights – and are written with an explicitly transformative purpose. They also often reflect include new independent bodies such as human rights commissions and electoral tribunals whose position and function within the traditional structure is novel. The practice of the separation of powers has also changed, as the executive has tended to gain power and deliberative bodies like legislatures have often been thrown into a state of crisis. The chapters in this edited volume grapple with these shifts and the ways in which the doctrine of the separation of powers might respond to them. It also asks whether the shifts that are taking place are mostly a product of the constitutional systems of the global south, or instead reflect changes that run across most liberal democratic constitutional systems around the world.
This edited volume presents the work of academics from the Global South and explores, from local and regional settings, how the legal order and people’s perceptions of it translates into an understanding of what constitutes "criminal" behaviors or activities. This book aims to address the gap between criminal law in theory and practice in the Global South by assembling 11 chapters from established and emerging scholars from various underrepresented regions of the world. Drawing on research from Singapore, the Philippines, Peru, Indonesia, India, the Dominican Republic, Burma, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Argentina, this book explores a range of issues that straddle the line between social deviance and legal crimes in such societies, including extramarital affairs, gender-based violence, gambling, LGBT issues, and corruption. Issues of inclusivity versus exclusivity, modernity versus tradition, globalization of capital versus cultural revivalism are explored. The contributions critically analyze the role politics and institutions play in shaping these issues. There is an urgent need for empirical studies and new theoretical approaches that can capture the complexity of crime phenomena that occur in the Global South. This book will provide essential material to facilitate the development of new approaches more suitable to understanding the social phenomena related to crime in these societies. This book will make an important contribution in the development of Southern criminology. It will be of interest to students and researchers of criminology and sociology engaged in studies of sentencing and punishment, theories of crime, law and practice, and postcolonialism.
This book explains why successful international peacebuilding depends on the unorthodox actions of country-based staff, whose deviations from approved procedures help make global governance organizations accountable to local realities. Using rich ethnographic material from several countries, it will interest scholars, students, and policymakers.
