Contemporary movements for the reform of global institutions advocate greater
transparency, greater democracy, and greater accountability. Of these three, accountability is the
master value. Transparency is valuable as means to accountability: more transparent institutions
reveal whether officials have performed their duties. Democracy is valuable as a mechanism of
accountability: elections enable the people peacefully to remove officials who have not done
what it is their responsibility to do. “Accountability,” it has been said, “is the central issue of our
time.”
The focus of this paper is accountability in international development aid: that range of
efforts sponsored by the world’s rich aimed at permanently bettering the conditions of the
world’s poor. We begin by surveying some of the difficulties in international development work
that have raised concerns that development agencies are not accountable enough for producing
positive results in alleviating poverty. We then examine the concept of accountability, and
survey the general state of accountability in development agencies. A high-altitude map of the
main proposals for greater accountability in international development follows, and the paper
concludes by exploring one specific proposal for increasing accountability in development aid
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