Social accountability in metropolitan cities: Strategies and legacies in Delhi and São Paulo

Motivation Social accountability by civil society is an important part of strengthening democratic governance and improving the delivery of public services. Purpose The article documents the landscape of social accountability in two metropolitan cities. We identify widespread and contrasting forms of activism by the poor in metropolitan Delhi and São Paulo to improve public services, and a mix of factors that allow and impel the poor to engage in social accountability. While impact evaluation studies have identified accountability tools that can, in certain contexts, help improve public services, and case studies have explored accountability campaigns, neither has sought to examine and explain how widespread activism is, its intensity and which strategies are commonly used. Approach and methods The study is built on an unusual set of nested comparisons and survey method, comparing accountability activism in Delhi and São Paulo, services in healthcare and social assistance, and 40 low‐income micro‐regions of each city. We leverage these comparisons to identify causal factors that produce the patterns of activism we find. We conducted a survey of civil society leaders in each of these micro‐regions. Findings We find that accountability activism is high on the civil society agenda—it is common in almost all low‐income regions of Delhi and São Paulo. Its intensity and strategies vary in unexpected ways across the cities and services, suggesting that no single set of factors can explain all three features of activism. The type of service, presence of translocal actors, and institutions that seek to give citizens greater access to, and control over, government all shape different aspects of accountability activism. Going further along the causal chain, we argue that differences in the presence of translocal actors and institutional context are the legacy of earlier cycles of civil society mobilization. Policy implications Initiatives to introduce or support social accountability, and research on the topic, need to take account of the various causes of different aspects of accountability, and to take into account the historical formation of the landscape of activism in which they work.