Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Collaborative Social Accountability for Learning: From the School to Change at Scale

Wed, April 20, 9:30 to 11:00am CDT (9:30 to 11:00am CDT), Hyatt Regency - Minneapolis, Floor: 2, Greenway A

Proposal

In 2015, countries committed to ensuring inclusive and quality education for all and promoting lifelong learning as part of meeting Sustainable Development Goals. Three years later, the World Bank warned through its flagship report, World Development Report (WDR) 2018, of a learning crisis and identified critical policy actions to accelerate learning for all.
This presentation will discuss the contributions collaborative social accountability -as a form of citizen engagement- can make to the education sector in different countries. Collaborative social accountability processes engage citizens, communities, civil society groups, and public sector institutions in joint, iterative problem solving to tackle poverty and improve service delivery, sector governance, and accountability (Guerzovich and Poli 2020). Based on a review of the experiences and evaluations of the Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA) in different types of education systems and political economy contexts, four primary conclusions stand out: 1) The new focus of the education sector on learning (as opposed to access to education) warrants rethinking the added value of social accountability and citizen engagement to the efforts of the education sector as well as its approaches; 2) Collaborative social accountability can address challenges associated with the implementation of policy actions targeted at the immediate and systemic causes of the learning crisis, starting at school level; 3) Integrating and/or building synergies between government sectoral reforms and delivery chains and civil society-led interventions opens pathways to obtain, scale up, and sustain results. It can contribute to system strengthening and greater resilience through deliberation, compromise, multi-stakeholder social learning, and collective action – a pathway we call resonance (Guerzovich, et.al. 2021). 4) Resonance is one of multiple pathways to social accountability to scale up in the education sector. Each one of these pathways puts a different emphasis on the dividends derived from conflict and on the promise of social learning to resolve collective action problems that undermine learning.
Practitioners, policy-makers and donors’ bets in the education sector should interrogate rather than assume: a) the transferability (Masset and White, 2019) of their preferred pathways across settings and within their portfolios; b) positive, negative, or neutral interaction effects across alternative pathways to scale at a point in time and over time (Poli, et.al. 2020).

Author