Allies Unknown : Social Accountability and Legal Empowerment

This essay suggests that two strands of social action which have hitherto developed separately - legal empowerment and social accountability - ought to learn from one another. Legal empowerment efforts grow out of the tradition of legal aid for the poor; they assist citizens in seeking remedies to b...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author:	Maru, V.
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	EN
Published:	2012
Subjects:	Humans International Cooperation Patient Rights Power (Psychology) Social Justice Social Responsibility World Health
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/5107

id	okr-10986-5107
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	okr-10986-51072021-04-23T14:02:21Z Allies Unknown : Social Accountability and Legal Empowerment Maru, V. Humans International Cooperation Patient Rights Power (Psychology) Social Justice Social Responsibility World Health This essay suggests that two strands of social action which have hitherto developed separately - legal empowerment and social accountability - ought to learn from one another. Legal empowerment efforts grow out of the tradition of legal aid for the poor; they assist citizens in seeking remedies to breaches of rights. Social accountability interventions employ information and participation to demand fairer, more effective public services. The two approaches share a focus on the interface between communities and local institutions. The legal empowerment approach includes, in addition, the pursuit of redress from the wider network of state authority. The essay suggests that social accountability interventions should couple local community pressure with legal empowerment strategies for seeking remedies from the broader institutional landscape. Legal empowerment programs, for their part, often under-emphasize injustices related to essential public services such as health and education, perhaps in part because they tend to wait for communities and individuals to raise problems. Instead, legal empowerment programs should learn from social accountability practitioners' use of aggregate data as a catalyst for community action. Legal empowerment organizations would also benefit from adopting the attention to empirical impact evaluation that has characterized experimentation in social accountability. 2012-03-30T07:31:19Z 2012-03-30T07:31:19Z 2010 Journal Article Health Hum Rights 2150-4113 (Electronic) 1079-0969 (Linking) http://hdl.handle.net/10986/5107 EN http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo World Bank Journal Article
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	Digital Repositories
building	World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
collection	World Bank
language	EN
topic	Humans International Cooperation Patient Rights Power (Psychology) Social Justice Social Responsibility World Health
spellingShingle	Humans International Cooperation Patient Rights Power (Psychology) Social Justice Social Responsibility World Health Maru, V. Allies Unknown : Social Accountability and Legal Empowerment
relation	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo
description	This essay suggests that two strands of social action which have hitherto developed separately - legal empowerment and social accountability - ought to learn from one another. Legal empowerment efforts grow out of the tradition of legal aid for the poor; they assist citizens in seeking remedies to breaches of rights. Social accountability interventions employ information and participation to demand fairer, more effective public services. The two approaches share a focus on the interface between communities and local institutions. The legal empowerment approach includes, in addition, the pursuit of redress from the wider network of state authority. The essay suggests that social accountability interventions should couple local community pressure with legal empowerment strategies for seeking remedies from the broader institutional landscape. Legal empowerment programs, for their part, often under-emphasize injustices related to essential public services such as health and education, perhaps in part because they tend to wait for communities and individuals to raise problems. Instead, legal empowerment programs should learn from social accountability practitioners' use of aggregate data as a catalyst for community action. Legal empowerment organizations would also benefit from adopting the attention to empirical impact evaluation that has characterized experimentation in social accountability.
format	Journal Article
author	Maru, V.
author_facet	Maru, V.
author_sort	Maru, V.
title	Allies Unknown : Social Accountability and Legal Empowerment
title_short	Allies Unknown : Social Accountability and Legal Empowerment
title_full	Allies Unknown : Social Accountability and Legal Empowerment
title_fullStr	Allies Unknown : Social Accountability and Legal Empowerment
title_full_unstemmed	Allies Unknown : Social Accountability and Legal Empowerment
title_sort	allies unknown : social accountability and legal empowerment
publishDate	2012
url	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/5107
_version_	1764393971195314176

Allies Unknown : Social Accountability and Legal Empowerment

Similar Items