Written by Blair Glencorse

How Did We Develop The New Strategy?

Accountability Lab began over a decade ago as an effort to support local change-makers within specific communities to develop creative ideas around governance issues. Our growth has been exciting- and we are now a global translocal network of Labs that is building an eco-system for accountability around the world. Despite all of the ups and downs of the past ten years, our vision remains the same as it has always been, because it is ever more important- a world in which resources are used wisely, decisions benefit everyone fairly, and people lead secure lives. Our mission is to make governance work for people through supporting active citizens, responsible leaders and accountable institutions.

The new strategy is the result of a year-long strategy development process that began in early 2022, which involved seven core steps: i) management review of the 2020-2023 strategy; ii) an external organizational review, carried out by The Better Org; iii) a strategic retreat with the senior management team and Country Directors in Zimbabwe in June 2022; iv) ongoing feedback and ideas from peers and stakeholders in our work; v) a period for public comment and feedback on the strategic draft in September/October 2022; vi) country-level feedback and orientation with our Labs; and vii) finalization and approval of the Lab’s Board of Directors across all Accountability Labs in November and December 2022. 

We have used this process as a way for us to collectively renew commitment to our values; build a shared vocabulary and language for our work; and to ensure a collective understanding of who we are and where we are going as an organization. We see this strategy as a living document that we will update and adapt over time as we grow and improve.   

What’s the Big Picture? 

Our new strategy is our third- and builds on our 2017-2020 and 2020-2023 strategies. We have experimented and learned (Accountability Lab version 1.0); tested again (version 2.0) and now that we have significant buy-in for our work, we are scaling up our efforts as the new way to work on accountability (version 3.0). We have made great progress building the organization we want to be and want to work for- now we want to ensure we are building the accountability field. In the coming years, we are looking to embed our approach further and truly operate as a translocal network. We hope to be the community through which anyone thinking and working creatively on these issues finds solidarity, support and energy.

What is a translocal network, you might be asking? Translocal networks provide a way to break down big ideas- like accountability- into more manageable pieces; and understand how local efforts to problem-solve are both essential and instructive. They allow us to see how what appear to be smaller fixes can actually connect together to change the social fabric and build the trust we need over time. For us at the Lab, being a translocal network means working deeply in communities and among the networks in which we hope to support accountability; organic and intentional efforts to connect dots and fill gaps where we are best placed to do so; centering learning to inform and improve practice; and building a shared discourse, implicitly in what we do and explicitly through our messaging around our cause; and prioritizing partnerships through sharing resources and capacities and putting the eco-system as a whole ahead of individual or organizational recognition or goals. 

For us, being a translocal network also means distributed, decolonized and equitable leadership- we are working to ensure that the Accountability Lab is led through a progressive, collaborative and shared network of leaders across the countries in which we work, all of whom support decision-making both locally and globally. We also hold ourselves accountable to each other in a variety of ways- through local governance processes across Labs and through the Accountable Now self-assessment process, among other efforts.

So What Will We Do and What Are The Priorities?

During the strategic development process, we thought hard about what we do that is uniquely valuable. We collectively agreed to continue to focus on the three core areas of work we have developed over the past three years, as laid out in our new Theory of Action: 

1. Shifting norms and behaviors- around issues of transparency and accountability to ensure that integrity becomes the expected behavior within societies (campaigns). Examples from our work include Integrity Icon and Voice2Rep;

2. Equipping reformers for collective action- inside and outside government- with the knowledge and tools they need to push safely for better governance through training and learning (knowledge). Examples from our work include the Accountability Incubator and the Integrity Innovation Labs;

3. Influencing policies, processes and practices- around critical accountability issues, through growing coalitions and advocating for change (communities). Examples from our work include the Civic Action Teams (CivActs) and our advocacy through fora including the G20, among others.

Finally, we have identified a number of strategic themes around which we feel we would like to grow our learning, networks, programming and advocacy in the 2023-2026 period. These are:

• Inclusion- including a specific focus on the voices of women, young people, people with disabilities and those that might be most excluded from decision-making due to language, geography, religion or other issues; 

• Climate justice- including a specific focus on strengthening inclusive governance of natural resources and land, climate adaptation and resilience programs, and a just and equitable energy transition;

• Digital governance- including leveraging technology to enhance good governance, disinformation, digital rights and data protection/privacy, and digital surveillance;

• Civic agency- specifically strengthening participation in democratic processes, including through access to the right to information, media freedoms and electoral processes.

How Will We Measure Our Progress?

We aim to measure the impact of our work in ethical, non-extractive ways that place a primacy on collective contributions to accountability and lifting up the stories of our communities and networks as much as we can. We will continue to improve our data collection efforts; build learning and training capacity among our teams; carry out external evaluations of our work; and we also hope to build out an evidence map of key gaps in our approaches. Check out our key impact metrics and indicators for the 2023-2026 period here.

We are a learning organization and we understand that we are in a position to try new things to improve what we do and share insights from those efforts with others. We will continue to share in an ongoing way, including through our visual arts programs, our Accountabili-tea podcast, our growing action research efforts, regular learning reports and more. We’ll know we have learned effectively when we change our approaches based on lessons from our work; when others tell us they have used our insights to change what they do; and when elements of our ideas are adopted more broadly within the accountability field.  

Next Steps

Thank you to all of our partners and supporters who have helped to make this strategy– and our impact- a reality. The strategy has been approved by each individual Lab Board of Directors. We are aiming to have strategic “check-in” conversations every six months; and a mini-strategic review annually during the lifetime of this document. We will also aim to host a strategic retreat with the management of Accountability Labs globally in 2024. 

We are very open to ideas, suggestions and feedback on this strategy! What resonates with you? What are we missing? Where have we got it wrong? Feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] with any thoughts. Keep up-to-date with our progress at www.accountabilitylab.org and on social media. 

Sheena Adams