Civil society and accountability – should donors try to influence civil society efforts to strengthen accountability?

In this paper, we present some constructive criticism of the concept of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) as agents of domestic accountability, drawing on our experience implementing the Accountability programme in Tanzania (AcT). We found that often CSO accountability initiatives have little demonstrable impact under scrutiny, and there is some evidence that donor support of these programmes weakens domestic accountability as CSOs end up being accountable to donors rather than the groups they set out to represent. We also present some guiding principles for donor support of CSOs, based on this analysis.

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