Rethinking Accountability in Practice: Beyond Shared Commitments

Accountability is a central idea in development practice. It appears in partnership agreements, reporting systems, coordination frameworks, and programme designs. Across the sector, it is widely accepted as essential for effective and responsible development work.

Yet beneath this shared agreement lies a more complex reality: accountability is not experienced in the same way by all actors. At the Philanthropy Reform Alliance (PRA), we are exploring a simple but important question: What does accountability actually look like in practice across different actors in development partnerships?

In many contexts, INGOs, CBOs, funders, and communities all describe themselves as accountable. However, what they are accountable for, to whom they are accountable, and how accountability is measured or experienced often differ significantly. These differences are rarely neutral; they are shaped by power, history, institutional design, and differing levels of risk and responsibility within the system.

This raises deeper questions about how accountability is constructed and lived in practice. How is accountability experienced differently across roles and relationships? What shapes expectations of accountability between funders, intermediaries, and community-based actors? How do trust, history, and perceptions of risk influence these expectations? And where do formal systems support accountability, versus where informal practices and relationships carry more weight?

Through our Collaborative Unlearning Lab on Mutual Accountability, we are creating space for INGOs and CBOs to reflect on these questions together, grounded in lived experience rather than abstract definitions or fixed frameworks. The intention is not to arrive at a single model of “correct” accountability, but to open up space for deeper understanding.

We are particularly interested in three shifts: making visible how accountability currently functions across different contexts; surfacing the assumptions that shape it; and exploring what becomes possible when these assumptions are examined collectively. Often, the most meaningful change begins not with new frameworks, but with clearer awareness of how existing ones are actually lived in practice.

At PRA, we see this reflection as part of a broader effort to rethink how development systems operate, through dialogue, inquiry, and shared learning. By creating space to surface and examine lived realities, we aim to support more honest, relational, and contextually grounded approaches to accountability across the development ecosystem.