The Interweaving of Formal and Informal Accountability: The Case of Rural Water Supply in Bunda District, Tanzania

Accountability remains one of those 'golden concepts' whose impact on policy discourses is indisputable. For instance, all major prescriptions on policy failures – including corruption problems – in a developing country context arguably center on increasing accountability. In the literature vertical, horizontal, and diagonal are generally distinguished.. However, more recently, the scholarship on accountability has started to distinguish between formal and informal accountability mechanisms, which can each be vertical, horizontal, or diagonal. Little is known on the relationship between different types of informal accountability and, perhaps more importantly, the multiple relationships between formal and informal accountability. A four-fold typology for this last relationship was proposed by Helmke and Levitsky (2004): complementary, accommodating, competing, and substitutive. Based on extensive fieldwork in the sector of rural water supply, conducted in Bunda district, North-Western part of Tanzania, this paper argues that formal accountability mechanisms in this case study are weak. The much stronger informal accountability mechanisms exist in a parallel and determine for a larger part which actions are taken to improve service delivery. These informal accountability mechanisms are classified as ‘competing’ with formal accountability mechanisms because informal accountability mechanisms structure politicians and bureaucrats incentives in ways that are incompatible with the formal service delivery mandates. They include e.g. rent-seeking, clientelism, and party caucus. For further research, we propose a conceptualization where formal and informal accountability mechanisms combine and intertwine in a ‘governmentality’ as a ‘regime of practices’. Therefore, to have any chance of succeeding, reform interventions need to be based on this concept of governmentality and its manifestations.