This essay suggests that two strands of social action which have hitherto developed
separately — legal empowerment and social accountability — ought to learn from one
another. Legal empowerment efforts grow out of the tradition of legal aid for the poor;
they assist citizens in seeking remedies to breaches of rights. Social accountability
interventions employ information and participation to demand fairer, more effective
public services. The two approaches share a focus on the interface between communities
and local institutions. The legal empowerment approach includes, in addition, the
pursuit of redress from the wider network of state authority. The essay suggests that
social accountability interventions should couple local community pressure with legal
empowerment strategies for seeking remedies from the broader institutional landscape.
Legal empowerment programs, for their part, often under-emphasize injustices related
to essential public services such as health and education, perhaps in part because
they tend to wait for communities and individuals to raise problems. Instead, legal
empowerment programs should learn from social accountability practitioners’ use of
aggregate data as a catalyst for community action. Legal empowerment organizations
would also benefit from adopting the attention to empirical impact evaluation that has
characterized experimentation in social accountability.