To hold governments accountable for the commitments they’ve made to the Sustainable Development Goals and gender equality, we’re stronger together—with legislative auditors, elected oversight bodies, and citizens and civil society organizations (CSOs) all playing a role.
As the Canadian Audit and Accountability Foundation (CAAF) has written about before, legislative auditors in many countries are considering the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and beginning to conduct performance audits that examine how their governments are implementing the SDGs. (Read more about their recent findings in Are Nations Prepared for Implementation of the 2030 Agenda?)
Following the accountability arrangements in place in many jurisdictions, when audit institutions publish their reports, elected oversight bodies (such as Public Accounts Committees or other parliamentary committees) will review them and follow up to see whether the governments have implemented the audit recommendations. This relationship is depicted in the diagram at right.
However, without the involvement of citizens and CSOs, this accountability process is missing an important voice. Particularly when it comes to the SDGs and gender equality—which are new topics for most audit institutions and oversight bodies—citizens and CSOs have important expertise to contribute.
As we have seen in some of our recent research, audit institutions are increasingly interested in engaging citizens in their work. The input of citizens and CSOs can strengthen performance audits, for instance by helping audit institutions to identify relevant topics to audit, giving them access to new perspectives and expertise, and enabling them to better understand how government programs are impacting citizens, including in vulnerable and marginalized populations. As well, citizens and CSOs have the power to increase the reach and impact of audits, by raising the visibility of audits and applying pressure on government to implement audit recommendations.
Engaging with audit institutions and elected oversight bodies also presents opportunities for citizens and CSOs to work towards their own advocacy and accountability objectives. For example, they can build upon audit findings to promote advocacy strategies aligned with their priorities, ensure auditors are aware of the issues that matter to them, and help give a voice to vulnerable and marginalized populations who may otherwise may not be heard in the accountability process.
Greater engagement of civil society in the accountability process is therefore a win-win that can improve the work of audit institutions and oversight bodies and help CSOs meet their goals. And when they work together to hold governments accountable for the SDGs and gender equality, all citizens benefit from stronger accountability.
To support this engagement, CAAF is developing a guide for citizens and CSOs on how to engage and work with audit institutions and elected oversight bodies to hold government accountable for the implementation of the SDGs and specifically SDG 5, “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.” We launched this project at a side event at the Women Deliver 2019 Conference earlier this year, bringing together citizens, CSOs, audit institutions and elected officials to explore opportunities for collaboration. We are now writing the guide, working in partnership with Women Deliver and benefiting from the input of many CSOs, as well as audit institutions and elected officials. The project is being funded by the Government of Canada, through its support for our International Governance, Accountability and Performance program.
In the guide, we will delve into three main ways that citizens and CSOs can engage in the accountability process:
- Using audits as sources of reliable, independent evidence for their own advocacy work and increasing the impact and reach of audit reports;
- Engaging with audit institutions and oversight bodies, for example by providing input to audit topic selection or to specific audits; and
- Engaging like auditors by employing some performance audit techniques themselves to assess how government is progressing towards the SDGs and its gender equality commitments.
The guide will offer strategies and practical tools to help citizens and CSOs engage in each of those ways and will share examples and good practices from several countries.
We’re looking forward to publishing this guide in 2020 and sharing good practices at a side event during the 64th session of the Commission on the Status of Women in March of that year. In the meantime, if you have personal experiences or examples of engaging with audit institutions or oversight bodies that you would like to share with CAAF, please contact Marie-Hélène Bérubé at mhberube@caaf-fcar.ca.
You may also be interested in another guide that CAAF and Women Deliver published with the International Institute for Sustainable Development, our Practice Guide to Auditing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Gender Equality. While it was written with auditors in mind, the guidance can also be of use to citizens and CSOs.