Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on experiences with community score cards in the education and health fields in Morocco in the wake of its 'Arab Spring'. It questions these social accountability initiatives as tools used by donors to help enhance state legitimacy.

Paper long abstract:

In the wake of the Arab Spring, governments in the Middle East and North Africa region have responded to calls for greater accountability by creating new "participatory" institutions in the context of increased decentralization to municipal levels, often with the support of international donors. The focus in this paper is on Morocco and local experiences with community score cards (CSCs) in the education and health fields. They serve as examples of potentially innovative, even if foreign-inspired, mechanisms to renew the "social contract" between citizens and the state after a period of upheaval and social contestations of state power. The paper will present the initial findings from three case studies. The projects are funded by the European Union and The World Bank, and implemented by the international NGO CARE in partnership with Moroccan NGOs. The paper will first focus on the role of citizens and civil-society participation in achieving accountable outcomes, and how they perceive the (still largely authoritarian) state. Then it will address the role of new intermediaries in translating global discourses and tools for social accountability into local language and context. Finally, it will discuss the organizational incentives of civil servants to deliver better social services. The paper argues that while CSCs as implemented in Morocco do bring about collective mobilization that results in improved service delivery, their potentially positive effects on state legitimacy are mitigated by the practice of government authorities to use them to co-opt potential regime critics.