Infomediaries and Accountability

"With growing consensus that transparency does not always or automatically lead directly to accountability - and research pointing to a role for infomediaries in generating accountability from transparent information - there is an emerging interest in understanding the role and impact of infomediaries on accountability."

This rapid research review provides a brief summary of the evidence on the impact of the "infomediaries" - in particular, the media - in generating greater government accountability and citizen empowerment. It focuses primarily on the impact of information flow from citizens to government and is interested in infomediaries that go beyond simply making information available, to those catalysing government responsiveness and accountability and citizen empowerment through the ways they gather, analyse, and distribute information.

The literature examined for this rapid review illustrates a wide variety of different media and tools used to gather and disseminate information to and from citizens in order to press for greater government accountability. Examples include: social media, data visualisations, online interactive portals, SMS messaging, radio phone-ins, face-to-face meetings, surveys, and crowdsourcing techniques. Sometimes within the literature a distinction is made between infomediaries - referring to the traditional media and newer open data actors - and political intermediaries, such as civil society organisations (CSOs) that may play both a (newer) information role alongside and complementary to other (more traditional) intermediary functions, such as fostering citizen participation and issue advocacy, monitoring political processes, and undertaking community service and civic education activities.

This rapid research has found several reviews of the evidence on the relationship between infomediaries and governance outcomes. A common conclusion is that there is strong evidence of the link between free media and better governance and government responsiveness on a range of issues, including public spending on education and health and public food distribution. For example, the small body of literature indicates the kinds of accountability impacts that infomediaries are helping to generate, such as (examples are fleshed out in detail within the full research review):

• Improved people's knowledge of key governance issues, and in some countries, their political participation (TV and radio debate programmes in Kenya, Nepal, and Sierra Leone - BBC Media Action);
• Catalysed changes to service delivery (community radio in Nepal - BBC Media Action);
• Generated new governmental accountability procedures for a cash transfer programme (data journalism in Kenya - Internews. "...["A] journalist...exposed missing funds, inefficient distribution and ghost recipients in the Kenyan parliament's management of a cash transfer programme. After a front-page story was run for several days, the government undertook an audit, introduced new vetting committees that included community leaders and initiated a mobile banking service to distribute the funding");
• Empowered residents to negotiate water provision with government authorities in South Africa (CSO-supported community-based freedom of information (FOI) strategies in South Africa - Open Democracy Advice Centre); and
• Increase in the allocation for school budgets in Indonesia (CSO-supported budget transparency initiative - Centre for Information and Regional Studies (Pattiro Malang).

That said, not all the evidence is positive. Evidence of the impact on disclosure of information - often through the media - is mixed with regard to effects on election outcomes. Other quasi-experimental research finds that while media initiatives have led to positive governance outcomes, including improved accountability, they have also at times had unexpected adverse effects (for example, in Vietnam, publishing national assembly delegate performance data on the internet resulted in the more outspoken delegates critical of the one-party state less likely to be re-elected, among other outcomes). Furthermore, the experimental studies on media initiatives and accountability have been confined to a small number of countries, with research questions linked to specific interventions and outcomes, making generalising difficult.

Other key findings from the review include:
Context and enabling factors: There is a range of enabling factors on both the citizen voice (demand) and state (supply side) which affect the success of infomediary interventions. Infomediaries are less successful in generating accountability outcomes in politically divisive and closed contexts, and the most effective strategies are grounded in the cultural and political context of the countries concerned. Furthermore, oppositional or confrontational media roles may miss other key roles the media can play in creating trustworthy spaces, often the most constructive mechanism for engaging both governments and citizens.

Donor role: On the whole, donors tend not to invest in the media for the long term, struggle to integrate the media into broader policy agendas, and lack a clearly agreed strategic framework to position media support. With little data to suggest that the "transparency+participation=accountability" theory of change is working in practice with public governance-oriented multistakeholder initiatives, some donors are looking for the right infomediaries to bridge the gap; others are focusing on strengthening citizen organisational capacities.

Risks: Most media and other infomediaries in fragile states are operating in difficult and co-opted contexts. Like all governance work, media interventions can often entail political risks for donors and are affected by changing political circumstances. Infomediaries have a powerful role in deciding whose voices get heard by whom; it cannot be assumed that infomediaries always represent the diversity of voices within the constituency they claim to represent. Focusing solely on the role of infomediaries may distract from taking a more contextualised and systems view of accountability. In this accountability ecosystems approach to change, infomediaries - and the mediation of information - play a complementary but secondary role.

The research review concludes with a reference list and links to relevant websites.