Voice, social contract, and accountability are discussed from the point of view of the function of law, justice, judicial systems and related areas from human rights to government policy, urban development, resource management, gender, social rights, economic reforms, governance, sustainable development and anti-corruption.

The newly adopted post-2015 development agenda is centered on 17 sustainable development goals to be reached by 2030. This volume of the World Bank Legal Review looks at how law and justice systems can support the financing and implementation of these goals, including the role of the rule of law and economic and social rights. The contributors, including legal scholars, development practitioners, and financial experts, analyze the goals, explore ways in which they can be achieved, and examine ways that recent relevant law and justice programs have worked. A wide array of topics are covered, from the legal aspects of collecting and monitoring vital data, to improving legal identity programs, to creating innovative health care regulation, to legal and judicial reform, to providing private sector†“financing of public education projects to the provision of global public goods. Additionally, a special section on Europe looks at financial crisis management, enforcement of court decisions and the workings of the European Court of Justice. The opportunities and challenges of the 2030 agenda are many. This volume looks at both from multiple perspectives, demonstrating how sustainable development can go forward in a way in which everyone benefits.

In many low and middle income countries, dismal failures in the quality of public service delivery such as absenteeism among teachers and doctors and leakages of public funds have driven the agenda for better governance and accountability. This has raised interest in the idea that citizens can contribute to improved quality of service delivery by holding policy-makers and providers of services accountable. This proposition is particularly resonant when it comes to the human development sectors – health, education and social protection – which involve close interactions between providers and citizens/users of services. Governments, NGOs, and donors alike have been experimenting with various “social accountability” tools that aim to inform citizens and communities about their rights, the standards of service delivery they should expect, and actual performance; and facilitate access to formal redress mechanisms to address service failures. The report reviews how citizens – individually and collectively – can influence service delivery through access to information and opportunities to use it to hold providers – both frontline service providers and program managers – accountable. It focuses on social accountability measures that support the use of information to increase transparency and service delivery and grievance redress mechanisms to help citizens use information to improve accountability. The report takes stock of what is known from international evidence and from within projects supported by the World Bank to identify knowledge gaps, key questions and areas for further work. It synthesizes experience to date; identifies what resources are needed to support more effective use of social accountability tools and approaches; and formulates considerations for their use in human development. The report concludes that the relationships between citizens, policy-makers, program managers, and service providers are complicated, not always direct or easily altered through a single intervention, such as an information campaign or scorecard exercise. The evidence base on social accountability mechanisms in the HD sectors is under development. There is a small but growing set of evaluations which test the impact of information interventions on service delivery and HD outcomes. There is ample space for future experiments to test how to make social accountability work at the country level.

Whilst many of us would agree that human rights are more important than corporate profits, the reality is often different; such realities as child labour and environmental destruction caused by corporate activities make this patently clear. Recognising that balancing human rights and business interests can be problematic, Corporate Accountability considers the limits of existing complaint mechanisms and examines non-judicial alternatives for conflict resolution.

Today, a transnational constellation of 'rule of law' experts advise on 'good' legal systems to countries in the Global South. Yet these experts often claim that the 'rule of law' is nearly impossible to define, and they frequently point to the limits of their own expertise. In this innovative book, Deval Desai identifies this form of expertise as 'expert ignorance'. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Desai draws on insights from legal theory, sociology, development studies, and performance studies to explore how this paradoxical form of expertise works in practice. With a range of illustrative cases that span both global and local perspectives, this book considers the impact of expert ignorance on the rule of law and on expert governance more broadly. Contributing to the study of transnational law, governance, and expertise, Desai demonstrates the enduring power of proclaiming what one does not know. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

How do cities build a social contract with their diverse constituencies and foster political trust among the urban poor? This study focuses on informal traders, who constitute a major source of food security and employment in urban Africa. Centered on Ghana’s three main cities, we analyze interviews with metropolitan policymakers and a survey of approximately 1,200 informal traders. The findings show that expectations about reciprocity and procedural justice play a key role in shaping the probability of trusting one’s local government. Lower levels of trust were associated with disappointment over the lack of benefits that accompany tax payments to local assemblies. Moreover, those who had experienced harassment by city authorities were less likely to trust their local government. The analysis demonstrates that political trust at the subnational level deserves greater empirical attention, especially as countries continue to deepen decentralization initiatives and cities strive to meet global development goals around inclusivity.

This book adopts a holistic approach to identifying what could be done to surmount the corruption conundrum in the African continent. It acknowledges the objective reality of corruption in Africa, and identifies primary solutions to the issue. The volume takes a socio-legal approach in order to reveal the nature and extent of corruption, and suggests that solutions can be found simply by interrogating how society reacts to it. In conjunction with this, the book identifies and critiques constraints in the formation of a definitive definition of corruption. As shown here, although it is critical for African states to develop anti-corruption strategies, the solution to the problem requires an understanding of the significance of political will, and how the lack thereof has led to the endurance of corruption in Africa.