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Blog: Has politics shaped the terms ‘accountability’ and ‘participation’?

Photo (cropped): Jaboatão dos Guararapes, Pernambuco, Brazil. Photo credit: PAHO/Flickr licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Jul 2017
18/07/2017

In his blog Has politics shaped the terms 'accountability' and 'participation'? Luiz Eduardo Fonseca explores how politics has shaped the meaning of the terms 'accountability' and 'participation'. He compares the process in which meanings shift to a game where one person whispers a message that is relayed along a line of people and emerges at the end in a different form - this process of 'attenuation' can shed light on how the meaning of terms can change depending on the context, the speaker, the listener. He goes on to explore the terms accountability and participation, key concepts for development, and central for the Unequal Voices project, which is funded through ESRC-DFID's Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation. 

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The Impact Initiative blog posts are either from individual researchers or from major research programmes. Some of the blog posts are original source and are written by researchers and experts connected to the two research programmes jointly funded by ESRC and FCDO: the Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research and the Raising Learning Outcomes in Education Systems Research Programme. Other blog posts are imported from related websites and programmes. 

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