Accountable and Effective Development Cooperation in a Post-2015 Era

Based on the studies on national governance, this study defines three major dimensions of accountability: (i) answerability, the obligation to inform, explain and justify decisions and actions; (ii) enforcement, the capacity of accounting agencies to impose sanctions on public sector officials who violate their duties; and (iii) a clear delimitation of responsibility, the requirement that all actors should have clearly defined duties and performance standards. It also defines three modalities of accountability: (i) vertical, based on a principal-agent relation (elections being the most important one); (ii) horizontal, which encompasses the checks and balances in the exercise of state power and that exercised by specific oversight institutions; and (iii) social, the control exercised by multiple civil society organization and independent media on public sector officials.