Understanding Social Accountability: Politics, Power and Building New Social Contracts

Revising Social Contracts: Social Spending

This paper examines the determinants of social spending in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and East Asia during the 1980s and 1990s. We hypothesize that pronounced and enduring differences in welfare legacies and fiscal constraints affected the way countries of the three regions responded to more contemporary challenges of economic crisis, integration into global markets, and transitions from au...

Rethinking Social Contracts: Building Resilience in a Changing Climate

Social contracts play an important role in defining the reciprocal rights, obligations, and responsibilities between states and citizens. Climate change is creating new challenges for both states and citizens, inevitably forcing a rethinking of existing and evolving social contracts. In particular, the social arrangements that enhance the well-being and security of both present and future gener...

Transforming power: Social science and the politics of energy choices

This paper addresses key implications in momentous current global energy choices – both for social science and for society. Energy can be over-used as a lens for viewing social processes. But it is nonetheless of profound importance. Understanding possible ‘sustainable energy’ transformations requires attention to many tricky issues in social theory: around agency and structure and the interpla...

Social Accountability in Cambodia

Human Rights and Social Accountability

There is an emerging consensus within the international development community to subscribe to a human rights based approach to development. Most countries have signed onto international human rights conventions that have important implications for national legislative frameworks. The World Bank has thus far not directly endorsed a human rights based approach to development, but has argued that ...