When accountability meets power: realizing sexual and reproductive health and rights

This paper addresses a critical concern in realizing sexual and reproductive health and rights through policies and programs – the relationship between power and accountability. We examine accountability strategies for sexual and reproductive health and rights through the lens of power so that we might better understand and assess their actual working. Power often derives from deep structural inequalities, but also seeps into norms and beliefs, into what we ‘know’ as truth, and what we believe about the world and about ourselves within it. Power legitimizes hierarchy and authority, and manufactures consent. Its capillary action causes it to spread into every corner and social extremity, but also sets up the possibility of challenge and contestation.

Using illustrative examples, we show that in some contexts accountability strategies may confront and transform adverse power relationships. In other contexts, power relations may be more resistant to change, giving rise to contestation, accommodation, negotiation or even subversion of the goals of accountability strategies. This raises an important question about measurement. How is one to assess the achievements of accountability strategies, given the shifting sands on which they are implemented?

We argue that power-focused realist evaluations are needed that address four sets of questions about: i) the dimensions and sources of power that an accountability strategy confronts; ii) how power is built into the artefacts of the strategy – its objectives, rules, procedures, financing methods inter alia; iii) what incentives, disincentives and norms for behavior are set up by the interplay of the above; and iv) their consequences for the outcomes of the accountability strategy. We illustrate this approach through examples of performance, social and legal accountability strategies.