Mdee, A orcid.org/0000-0002-8260-1840 and Mushi, A (2021) Untangling blame and responsibility for service delivery and local governance performance: testing a grounded social accountability approach in Tanzania. Local Government Studies, 47 (6). pp. 993-1013. ISSN 0300-3930
Abstract
We examine the gap between theory and practice in social accountability mechanisms to improve local governance performance in Tanzania. We do so through drawing on an ethnographic investigation tracing lines of blame and responsibility for service delivery, from individual citizens up to the central state incorporating a total of 340 interviews and 12 focussed group discussions. We have two keys findings: Firstly, that there is a wide divergence between formal lines of accountability and where actors direct blame for performance failure in practice. Secondly, building a collective understanding of this divergence provides an effective starting point for intervention to improve performance. Our conclusion is that dominant assumptions on social accountability interventions require significant revision in light of our findings.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | blame; Local governance; service delivery; social accountability; Tanzania |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Politics & International Studies (POLIS) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 01 Dec 2020 12:13 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 22:31 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Routledge |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/03003930.2020.1842735 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:168598 |