Hi Aidan — thanks for this message! We were really interested in the agency and empowerment results as well, especially what we can take from the differences in different settings. We are looking forward to sharing more results soon — and will definitely follow up as we have more to share!

Thanks for this feedback Sue! You are right that these are complex issues and that the research won’t (and should not) point to a “black or white” explanation. The work in the Encouraging Participation paper is just a piece of the story, even for the T4D project, and we are interested to learn and share more about whether the complex picture we saw with empowerment and participation matches what we see in terms of impact (or lack thereof) on services. Our hope is that the evidence, while not a perfect map of how social accountability works, will provide some useful insights to advisors, practitioners and policymakers working on supporting, implementing, and integrating these approaches into their work. Looking forward to sharing more soon!

Hi David, Thank you for reading the post and for your thoughtful questions. It’s a good idea to look at recent trends in optimism or pessimism, and something we should think about as we fill out the rest of the story — what we’re describing here is just one part. We are working on implications for health and on ethnographic studies of what participation was like. We may then find that differences were partly about context (including the factors in that paper with Archon) — that is certainly my expectation. I do also want to note that some of the differences in perceptions of civic efficacy between participants in Tanzania and Indonesia may have to do with different ways of interpreting the question we asked (see Section 6 in the working paper). We look forward to sharing more findings from the project soon!