Early in 2005 the editors of this IDS Bulletin began developing a multi-country study to assess whether sector-wide reforms of public services, involving forms of decentralisation, pluralisation of service providers, or user/citizen participation, could enable
greater accountability from below.
Our interest was in forms of accountability that could expand coverage and improve the quality of public services for people who live in poverty. In the previous two and a half decades governments, first in the North and later in the South, combined these reforms in myriad ways to increase the responsiveness and quality of public services.
Many of these large institutional initiatives sought, among other things, to establish direct and ongoing accountability relations between service providers and the end-users of services, or the general public. State reformers with quite different viewpoints continue to believe that such accountability relations are a critical compliment, and in some cases a substitute, to accountability from above exercised by elected officials, and ultimately voters, and by administrative hierarchy.
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