Paper short abstract:

This research explores how multiple accountabilities for international and sustainable development are created in three phases: discursive level, enforcing level, and implementation level through a World Bank participatory development project.

Paper long abstract:

This research explores how accountability is created under the encountering of global development discourses and institutions in the local context within a developing country, implementing a participative development project. However, accountability cannot operate only with the discursive influence and through such institutional involvements. Instead, the local context in which such a discourse encounters must be incorporated through various types of social, cultural, political and technological mechanisms, and accountability construction is, therefore, social, political, cultural, and discursive. To comprehend its impact, this study selects a World Bank development project implemented by the Sri Lankan government, which promotes sustainable agriculture and irrigation in farming communities which possess 2000-year-old traditional knowledge of agriculture and irrigation systems.

Accordingly, this research explores the multiple accountabilities for international and sustainable development in three phases: development of participative projects at the discursive level (World Bank), incorporation of local agencies at the enforcing level (ministries and government officials), development project on the ground/ grassroots at the implementation level (community organisation and empowerment). I argue that the intellectual space where accountability practices in developing countries can be located as ‘development’ in this study, and I define development as a form of accountability.

I chose the ethnographic approach, and the study analyses data collected using observations of the farming community and interviews with farmers, government officials and the World Bank officials and documentary reviews with a social theory (assemblage theory). This study will contribute to the interdisciplinary literature on accounting, accountability and development studies.