This realist review addresses the question: 'Under what circumstances does enhancing
community accountability and empowerment improve education outcomes, particularly
for the poor?' Community accountability and empowerment interventions, it has been
argued, improve educational outcomes by improving the quality of educational services
and the participation of students and families in education. However, there has been no
agreed understanding of what is meant by ‘community accountability’ or ‘community
empowerment’ in relation to education. The range of interventions which, it has been
claimed, affect accountability and empowerment, is broad, and evidence of impacts has
been mixed.
Search strategies included keyword searches in numerous databases, including
IngentaConnect; JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive Icon; ProQuest; UNESCO
Information Sources; document searches of relevant websites; keyword and targeted
searches using Google Scholar; snowballing of references of included documents and
consultation with End User group members. Over 21,000 individual documents were
identified. Titles and/or abstracts were considered against inclusion and exclusion
criteria. ‘Core’ documents provided information on accountability and empowerment
interventions, and provided data on intermediate or final education outcomes. Other
documents were included if they provided data relevant to processes of change,
mechanisms, or contextual features affecting whether and how interventions ‘worked’ (or
did not).
At the beginning of the research, an initial programme theory was developed for the
overall class of community accountability and empowerment interventions, using a rough
hierarchy-of-outcomes format. Evidence relating to outcomes for education,
empowerment and accountability was aligned with that initial hierarchy of outcomes, and
revisions were made to address outcomes not covered by the initial rough theory.
Programme mechanisms were identified abductively. Features of context that appeared to
affect the operations and outcomes of interventions were identified through close reading
of texts and propositions about context (abstracted to the level of middle-level theory)
were drafted. Evidence from a wider selection of texts was aligned against the mechanism
and context propositions. A CMOC (Context-Mechanism-Outcome Configurations) table was
developed by aligning significant features of context against mechanisms, either on the
basis of evidence or on the basis of logic (where evidence was not available). A theoretical
model for the relationship between empowerment and accountability was proposed on the
basis of the findings. The CMOC table and the empowerment and accountability model
constitute the revised theory that is the intended product of a realist review. Ways in
which the theory might be used to support practice are described below. That theory
remains to be tested and further refined through future research and evaluation.