<\/p>\n
Published in the journal Health and Human Rights, this essay suggests that two strands of social action which have hitherto developed\u00a0separately \u2014 legal empowerment and social accountability \u2014 ought to learn from one\u00a0another. Legal empowerment efforts grow out of the tradition of legal aid for the poor;\u00a0they assist citizens in seeking remedies to breaches of rights. Social accountability\u00a0interventions employ information and participation to demand fairer, more effective\u00a0public services. The two approaches share a focus on the interface between communities\u00a0and local institutions. The legal empowerment approach includes, in addition, the pursuit of redress from the wider network of state authority. The essay suggests that\u00a0social accountability interventions should couple local community pressure with legal\u00a0empowerment strategies for seeking remedies from the broader institutional landscape. Legal empowerment programs, for their part, often under-emphasize injustices related\u00a0to essential public services such as health and education, perhaps in part because\u00a0they tend to wait for communities and individuals to raise problems. Instead, legal\u00a0empowerment programs should learn from social accountability practitioners\u2019 use of\u00a0aggregate data as a catalyst for community action. Legal empowerment organizations\u00a0would also benefit from adopting the attention to empirical impact evaluation that has\u00a0characterized experimentation in social accountability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":194291,"template":"","class_list":["post-189576","namati_resources","type-namati_resources","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n