IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/wbrobs/v29y2014i1p20-47..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Can Civil Society Overcome Government Failure in Africa?

Author

Listed:
  • Shantayanan Devarajan
  • Stuti Khemani
  • Michael Walton

Abstract

Government failures are widespread in Africa. Symptoms include absentee teachers, leakage of public funds, monopolized trucking, and employment-restricting regulations. Can civil society do anything about these failures? Would external donor support to civil society help? We argue that the challenge for civil society is to improve government functioning by strengthening political incentives—the underlying cause of government failure—rather than bypassing or supplanting the state. This paper reviews the available evidence on civil society interventions from this perspective. Although the current increase in political competition and extensive citizen engagement in Africa seems to create the potential for civil society influence, we find that there are large knowledge gaps regarding what works, where, and how. Some rigorous evaluations find significant impacts of civil society involvement on development outcomes, but these studies typically pay insufficient attention to the mechanisms. For example, are impacts due to overcoming government failure or to changing private household behavior, leaving the wasteful allocation of public resources untouched? We conclude that donor support to civil society should take an approach of learning by doing through ongoing experimentation backed by rigorous, data-based evaluations of the mechanisms of impact.

Suggested Citation

  • Shantayanan Devarajan & Stuti Khemani & Michael Walton, 2014. "Can Civil Society Overcome Government Failure in Africa?," The World Bank Research Observer, World Bank, vol. 29(1), pages 20-47.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:wbrobs:v:29:y:2014:i:1:p:20-47.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/wbro/lkt008
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fox, Jonathan A., 2015. "Social Accountability: What Does the Evidence Really Say?," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 346-361.
    2. Harry Blair, 2018. "Citizen Participation and Political Accountability for Public Service Delivery in India," Journal of South Asian Development, , vol. 13(1), pages 54-81, April.
    3. Alawattage, Chandana & Azure, John De-Clerk, 2021. "Behind the World Bank’s ringing declarations of “social accountability”: Ghana’s public financial management reform," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    4. Khemani, Stuti, 2015. "Buying votes versus supplying public services: Political incentives to under-invest in pro-poor policies," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 84-93.
    5. Dewachter, Sara & Holvoet, Nathalie & Kuppens, Miet & Molenaers, Nadia, 2018. "Beyond the Short versus Long Accountability Route Dichotomy: Using Multi-track Accountability Pathways to Study Performance of Rural Water Services in Uganda," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 158-169.
    6. Trust Madhovi, 2020. "The Impact of Social Accountability Mechanisms on Fiscal Management Challenges Facing Goromonzi Rural District Council, Zimbabwe," Journal of Public Administration and Governance, Macrothink Institute, vol. 10(2), pages 141160-1411, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:wbrobs:v:29:y:2014:i:1:p:20-47.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/wrldbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.