A realist assessment of the facilitation process for improving social accountability by community based organizations

ABSTRACT

The poor performance by local government institutions in service delivery has contributed to the proliferation of community-based organisations (CBOs) in many African countries. This development is unfolding within the context of growth in the aspirations of people and societies for greater transparency, democracy and participatory management. Such a scenario calls for greater social accountability by CBOs. This paper applied a realist approach guided by an action research process to assess the facilitation of community scorecards in improving social accountability by CBOs using the REPAIR project in Zimbabwe as a case study. Focus was placed on understanding the generative mechanisms within specific contexts under which social accountability outcomes emanated. The paper identified key contextual drivers, generative mechanisms and key outcomes, consolidated into streams of Context-Mechanism-Output (C–M-O) configurations. The paper concludes with recommendations on the potential utility of the C–M-O configurations for future facilitation of social accountability interventions for CBOs.

KEYWORDS:

• Social accountability
• community based organizations
• realist assessment
• generative mechanisms
• context
• outcomes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See (Lodenstein et al., 2013) for detailed examples.

2 This paper will not dwell into the philosophical foundations of Realism. For detailed accounts see for example Pawson (2013), Pawson and Tilley (1997) and Bhaskar (1978).

3 In this paper the terms CRMCs and CBOs will used interchangeably.

4 Chiefs on one hand claim that they are the legitimate representatives of the people as they are permanent and sanctioned by a higher authority (the ancestors), whilst on the other hand councilors claim that they have a mandate from the people because they were directly elected.

5 These were jointly developed by the community and CBOs to provide modalities for improved service provision.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by United States Agency for International Development: [Grant Number RFA-OAA-15-000007].