Examining social accountability as an anti-corruption approach in conservation and natural resource management

With increasing reliance on local and community-based management approaches in natural resource management (NRM) and conservation, the ways that corruption affects local processes is a growing concern. Social accountability shares important characteristics of anti-corruption strategies, especially its emphasis on transparency, accountability, and voice in citizen-based approaches for holding authorities to account. Social accountability processes may help conservation and NRM practitioners and the communities they work with change the enabling environment for some forms of corruption that result in negative environmental outcomes. At the same time, its impact on forms of corruption that are rooted in higher-level political and economic dynamics or driven by criminal actors may be limited. Strategies that link citizen voice to other anti-corruption and accountability initiatives may produce stronger results. Especially when these complementary initiatives are more confrontational, however, the risks to communities and individuals need to be carefully assessed. Practitioners in conservation and NRM can draw on a wide range of resources introduced in this overview to assess the context for social accountability and to design and implement appropriate support for social accountability initiatives.