Reading Larry Diamond's "The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World" made me reflect on ANSA-EAP's fourth pillar of social accountability (SAc), an enabling environment for SAc - "cultural appropriateness".
ANSA-EAP's framing of this pillar has always moved along two (2) tracks - not necessarily related:
- SAc tools or citizen monitoring instruments are often developed with specific governance issues or problems in mind. Thus, the need to customize whenever we apply them to another context. Example, a citizen report card (CRC) or community Score Card (CSC) conducted in a city context (like Bangalore, India) to get citizen feedback on public services (like electricity, transportation, sewerage, etc.) would need some tweaking when used to monitor the health center services in a rural community which were provided as part of a mining company's local development commitments in Benguet, Philippines
- SAc approaches have to take into account Asians' different value system when it comes to public leadership, democratic practice and good governance. Some explanations or elaborations on this that I've encountered in ANSA-EAP's discourse during the past three years: the concept of "headship" as our particular brand of Asian leadership, our inclination to communal rather than individual conception of rights, conflict avoidance and face-saving as common attitudes in public engagements, the tendency to look at the polity as a "bigger family" with public officials as heads of that family whose will can not be easily challenged, our penchant to maintain social order rather than promote divisive public debates, etc.
