Accountability and Policy Dialogue
Source: AFRODAD
Aid has a critical role to play in the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals in many developing countries, especially when it is deployed effectively in an accountable manner as part of a wider development strategy; it makes a lasting difference in helping people to lift themselves out of poverty. Of key importance to aid delivery and management has been the issues of accountability and policy dialogue.
Accountability is now a buzzword in contemporary development discourse. It is central to development policy, whether government accountability (as a central component of good governance), corporate accountability (promoted by a swathe of standards and codes), or civil society accountability (claimed by people and organizations from the bottom up). When accountability works, citizens are able to make demands on powerful institutions and ensure that those demands are met . The concept of accountability describes the rights and responsibilities that exist between people and the institutions that affect their lives, including governments, civil society and market actors. Accountability is not only the means through which individuals and organizations are held responsible for their decisions and actions, but also the means by which they take internal responsibility for shaping their organizational mission and values, for opening themselves to external scrutiny and for assessing performance in relation to goals. Accountability has beneficial effects not only for an organization’s stakeholders, but for the organization itself. In practice, accountability can take a number of different forms, depending on the institution in question.
The purpose of the 2005 Paris declaration on Aid effectiveness is to improve aid delivery in a way that best supports the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. It highlighted the importance of predictable, well aligned, programmed, and coordinated aid to achieve results . One of its five key principles is mutual accountability in which donors and developing countries pledged that they will hold each other mutually accountable for development based on the other four principles of Ownership, Alignment, Harmonization, and Management for Results. The Paris Declaration emphasizes accountability in relation to parliament and other domestic stakeholders which can only be feasible with effective structures for dialogue.
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