Why do poor people demand accountability from some participatory programs and not others?

There is a consensus that citizen oversight, or the capacity of citizens to demand accountability, over government programs improves program performance. Yet little is known about the conditions that enable citizens/beneficiaries to demand accountability. This dissertation approaches this void in the literature by comparing two Community Driven Development (CDD) programs in Argentina and asking the question of why beneficiary oversight was higher in one program than in the other and why, within the same program, it was higher in some provinces than in others. The main conclusions are: (i) for beneficiary oversight to work at the project level (i.e., for beneficiaries to be able to control subcontracted providers of technical assistance) it was not sufficient to have accountability mechanisms at that level (in this case being able to hire and fire providers); (ii) due to asymmetries of technical knowledge and power between beneficiaries and providers, the former depended on the support of program staff willing to level out these asymmetries; (iii) given a highly politicized context, ensuring that program staff supported beneficiaries at the project level required having beneficiary oversight at the program governance level; in the program where this did not happen, patronage and clientelism took over the program, distorted its participatory nature and led to its collapse;

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Serrano Berthet, Rodrigo

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Judith Tendler.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34166

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34166