Aid Transparency and Accountability: ‘Build It and They’ll Come’?

Concerns about the transparency of aid have become more prominent against a recent backdrop of donor commitments to increase aid effectiveness. Innovative approaches to providing more and better information about aid have been developed. This article explores the contemporary focus on aid transparency in the context of longer-standing concerns over accountable aid. It finds that the links between inputs, outputs and impacts in aid transparency and accountability initiatives are often not articulated or well-understood, and that the link between aid transparency and accountable aid is barely addressed. Future attempts to develop effective aid TAIs need to take full account of the diverse motivations, approaches and actors implicated in their – often implicit – theories of change, in particular the citizens of aid-recipient countries

Accountability as strategic transparency : Making sense of organizational responses to the International Aid Transparency Initiative

Aid transparency received a welcome boost in December 2011 when a critical mass of donors signed up to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), an electronic registry through which all aid expenditure is published using the same criteria. IATI launched with statements about increased effectiveness, improved collaboration and better decisions based on greater transparency. This article investigates the strategic nature of organizational responses to IATI. It places particular emphasis on subtle distinctions between norms and standards, diminishing returns on the production of additional data, and inconsistently communicated benefits. It concludes that these factors contribute to IATI membership being rearticulated as part of the management of organizations' visibility, hence reformulating compliance with IATI as a form of strategic communication