Society can play an important role in evaluating the performance or “quality” of government services. Education, police and health care reform are key areas in this regard. Examples of successful school councils abound (World Bank, 2003a: 62; 5; Cabrero et. al., 2003). Community supervision of local health care clinics has also been shown to be highly effective (World Bank, 2001: 14, Cornwall, Lucas & Pasteur, 2000). In recent years there has also been an important wave of community policing reform (Fung 2001). There are of course problems with an exclusive focus on performance as well. In technical terms, there may be a trade-off between “accountability for rule following” or “legal accountability” (Ackerman, 2004a) and “accountability for performance”. Indeed, this is what Robert Behn has characterized as “the accountability dilemma” (Behn, 2001). The discretion that allows bureaucrats to focus on performance and to discover creative ways to solve problems might also open up room for increased malfeasance. Nevertheless, it appears that this risk is reduced when civil society actors are vigilant since they usually maintain a close watch on both procedural and performance indicators simultaneously. The best pro-accountability strategies are ones that simultaneously focus citizen participation on enforcing the rules and on improving performance. For instance, the citizen participation outlined in Goetz and Jenkins’s research on India involves both of these characteristics (Goetz & Jenkins, 2001). They document how local rationing committees were set up in Mumbai in order both to assure that local shop owners followed the rules with respect to the handling of money and delivered high quality rations to the users of the shops. Here citizens are acting simultaneously as conscientious consumers and as vigilant observers of the legality of the process by which the products are delivered (see Box 2).
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