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Appropriating Technology for Accountability: Messages from 'Making All Voices Count'

Brighton: Institute of Development Studies (IDS) (2018), 30 pp.

Contains bibliogr. pp. 26-29

CC BY-SA

"The most important messages on the roles technologies can play in enabling citizen voice and accountable and responsive governance are: 1. Not all voices can be expressed via technologies. 2. Technologies can play decisive roles in improving services where the problem is a lack of planning data or user feedback. 3. Common design flaws in tech-for-governance initiatives often limit their effectiveness or their governance outcomes. 4. Transparency, information or open data are not sufficient to generate accountability. 5. Technologies can support social mobilisation and collective action by connecting citizens. 6. Technologies can create new spaces for engagement between citizen and state. 7. Technologies can help to empower citizens and strengthen their agency for engagement. 8. The kinds of democratic deliberation needed to challenge a systemic lack of accountability are rarely well supported by technologies. 9. Technologies alone don’t foster the trusting relationships needed between governments and citizens, and within each group of actors. 10. The capacities needed to transform governance relationships are developed offline and in social and political processes, rather than by technologies." (Conclusions, page 24)