Social Accountability and Participatory Planning – Lessons from the Kerala Experience

KERALA EXPERIENCE S. M Vijayanand1 What is Social Accountability? Accountability in its basic sense implies rendering of accounts and, by extension, indicates answerability to an external agency or group and, further, implies ensuring propriety, legality and safeguarding public interest in satisfaction of the expectations of the external agency or group. Social Accountability suggests accountability to the people. It is a core value in a democratic set up. In a decentralized democracy the basic objective is power to the people. The concept of social accountability is best expressed in the Gandhian idea of government as a trusteeship discharging its duties as trustees of the people. This conveys the impression of power being exercised in a fair, equitable, honest, and responsive manner – as required by law and in accordance with assigned responsibilities and expected performance standards. Social accountability extends to the entire gamut of the functioning of local governments and includes exercise of authority, taking of decisions, use of funds and attitude and behaviour. It is not just adherence to rules that is important in social accountability. There has to be a doing of right. More than efficiency and effectiveness, it is humaneness and morality which characterizes social responsibility. Social accountability is towards people at large and specifically voters, clients and target groups. Though not clearly demarcable, every government and local government has an element of general social accountability to all citizens, besides specific social accountability to user groups and target groups. Often in practice levels of accountability vary with levels of development. Though educated and better off citizens are able to enforce the required level of social accountability it is the poor who need to extract maximum social accountability particularly in use of anti‐poverty funds and decisions relating to the poor. From this angle, local governments need to have higher social accountability as their functional domain has elements of service delivery, social justice and economic development focusing on the relatively less well off people. Social accountability is required basically to reaffirm the rationale of democracy. Social accountability ensures transparency, reduces leakages, forces proper spending of funds, generates trust and peace, creates demand‐led improvement in services. In a sense, it is a continuing audit and a constant check on malfeasance. Technically accountability implies power and control by the people but in practice social accountability does not lead to sanctions, surcharges or punishments in a narrow sense. But it can bring about distance, alienation and finally rejection by the people of the government.