Social audits in service delivery: an annotated bibliography

This paper is part of the background research for the Skeptic’s Guide to Open Government (2022 Edition). Suchi Pande developed it with guidance from the Accountability Research Center.

This annotated bibliography identifies sources on how social audits work and their main benefits. It prioritizes empirical evidence over theoretical literature, and covers the last fifteen years. It is not a comprehensive list of sources on the topic and is limited to sources available in English.

Social audits are a tool to hold service providers accountable. For the purpose of this review, they must include three elements: 

1. Third-party assessment of access and quality of services; 
2. Third-party convenors who create enabling environments for public deliberation, and capacity building, information gathering, and assessment; and 
3. Presentation of findings in a public forum for collective deliberation.

This review includes 28 sources focused on international aid projects or national programs. Sixteen are peer-reviewed articles and 12 are grey literature including working papers, evaluation reports, toolkits, and social audits. Most (17 out of 28) are from South Asia (Bangladesh, India, and Nepal).