Accountability in International Development Aid (draft)

Contemporary movements for the reform of global institutions advocate greater \ntransparency, greater democracy, and greater accountability. Of these three, accountability is the \nmaster value. Transparency is valuable as means to accountability: more transparent institutions \nreveal whether officials have performed their duties. Democracy is valuable as a mechanism of \naccountability: elections enable the people peacefully to remove officials who have not done \nwhat it is their responsibility to do. “Accountability,” it has been said, “is the central issue of our \ntime.” \n \n \nThe focus of this paper is accountability in international development aid: that range of \nefforts sponsored by the world’s rich aimed at permanently bettering the conditions of the \nworld’s poor. We begin by surveying some of the difficulties in international development work \nthat have raised concerns that development agencies are not accountable enough for producing \npositive results in alleviating poverty. We then examine the concept of accountability, and \nsurvey the general state of accountability in development agencies. A high-altitude map of the \nmain proposals for greater accountability in international development follows, and the paper \nconcludes by exploring one specific proposal for increasing accountability in development aid.