Vexatious voice: The politics of downward accountability and subnational governance reform in Afghanistan

Peter Blunt and Saeed Khamoosh
Additional contact information
Peter Blunt: Centre for Organizations in Development, School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, England
Saeed Khamoosh: Local Council Affairs, Independent Directorate of Local Governance, Kabul, Afghanistan

Progress in Development Studies, 2016, vol. 16, issue 1, 81-100

Abstract: This article analyzes events surrounding a strike by Afghanistan’s provincial councils in 2015. It argues, first, that the events reflected competition between patronage networks in the country’s main institutions of representative government and their successful opposition to the president’s attempts to curb corruption – illustrating the difficulties of introducing even modest governance reforms in neopatrimonial states. Second, the evidence suggests that government should not establish district councils until it has sufficient resources to do so and until provincial councils can be properly regulated. However, third, in order to establish legally the position of executive prime minister and allow the president to fulfil his side of the election bargain a loya jirga – whose membership should include district councillors – will need to approve a change to the constitution. Fourth, donors will support district council establishment for this reason, but also because it facilitates ‘concrete’ measurement of progress and ‘democratic’ display and is therefore good for (donor) home consumption, though not necessarily for poverty or inequality reduction. Fifth, donor behaviour is seen as integral to neoliberal design, whose real interests are served best by state acquiescence rather than state sovereignty or sustainable and equitable development and should therefore be resisted.

Keywords: downward accountability; citizen voice; fragile states; development assistance; patronage; neopatrimonialism; corruption; representative institutions; political economy; state sovereignty; state capitalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464993415608085 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:prodev:v:16:y:2016:i:1:p:81-100

DOI: 10.1177/1464993415608085

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Progress in Development Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().