actual practice of most state agencies. And just as the World Bank had been in the forefront of the topdown public service reform efforts, it also played a leadership role with the new bottom-up approach.

By ‘bottom-up’ I mean state programs where priorities come directly from citizens, placing public officials in a responsive or even passive posture. The relevant mechanism is what Hirschman (1970) called ‘voice’. Samuel Paul (1992) while still a World Bank official was perhaps the first to propose it in the recent development literature as an alternative to top-down control.

While voice in the shape of citizen participation in governance goes back at least as far as Athenian direct democracy, its current ascendancy in development dates from James Wolfensohn’s restoration of poverty to the center of the World Bank’s mission in the late 1990s. The landmark _Voices of the Poor_ report, with a foreword co-written by Wolfensohn, found that public agencies were among the most important but also the least effective institutions in poor people’s lives. The Report called for ‘organized communities that can participate in devolved authority structures and keep local governments accountable’ (Narayan _et al._ , 2000: 283; see also Figures 10.1 and 10.2).

It was this aspect of the Report which went on to make a distinctive – and controversial - contribution to _WDR 2000/01_ . _WDR 2000/01_ advocated ‘empowerment’ of poor communities, including through participation in public services, and making public agencies directly accountable to the public via the media, the courts and advocacy by public society organizations. It also departed abruptly from the public administration doctrine of accountability with the assertion that ‘the quality of public service is reduced when public officials are held accountable more to their hierarchical superiors than to the people they serve.’ The new doctrine was amplified by _WDR 2004_ . The argument now was that elections are an inadequate way for citizens to control what state agencies do in their name: ‘Given the weaknesses in the ‘long route’ of accountability (i.e. classic vertical accountability), service outcomes can be improved by strengthening the ‘short route’ - by increasing the client’s power over providers.’ In making this argument, World Bank authors were mindful of innovations in developing countries where officials’ direct accountability to their clients has been institutionalized. The Indian experience with citizen report cards and the Brazilian experiment in participatory budgeting, both celebrated in _WDR 2004_ , are innovations which illustrate both the strength and one or two weaknesses of the new accountability doctrine.

# **Box 3. ‘Short-Route’ Accountability in India and Brazil**

A ‘citizen report card’ survey in Bengaluru (Bangalore) in Karnataka state in 1993, initiated by Samuel Paul (admirably putting his money where his mouth was), identified an abysmal satisfaction rating of 9% with municipal services. Following press coverage and action by the state government, satisfaction increased across two subsequent surveys to 48% in 2003. The World Bank evaluated the initiative positively (Ravindra, 2004), and the evidence that ‘voice’ was improving services, just as the new doctrine had said it would, stimulated replications in countries as far apart as Ethiopia, the Philippines and the Ukraine.

However, Paul himself was more cautious than his admirers. He concedes that service quality started to improve in the context of a wider urban reform program introduced by the Congress party state government which came to power in 1999. In fact the program was wound up in 2004 by an incoming state Chief Minister who believed that its urban bias had lost the Congress party votes. The Report Card initiative was not repeated after the 2004 election in Karnataka. Paul’s initiative suffered from the perception that it served a sectional (urban) interest.<sup>xii</sup> It was certainly providing direct accountability to citizens. But the accountability was only to one group of citizens, urban dwellers, and was perceived to be at the expense of rural dwellers.

The participatory budgeting experiment in Porto Alegre, Brazil draws on a strong history of social movements, and on the neighborhood associations and other participatory procedures introduced when the Workers’ Party took 13