Place Leadership in Social Accountability Initiatives

Abstract

This paper explores how social movement and civic actors enact and contribute to place leadership. It does so by examining how social movement organizations in South Africa use social audits to investigate and challenge government accountability and service delivery failures. The paper describes the meaning-making practices evident in social audit reports, and detail how social audit actors construct issues and positions through three framings–rights, regulations and lived realities. In this process, they leverage rights discourses and governance arrangements to legitimize their place leadership, and draw on multiple aspects and experiences of place to expose failures of governance and in the realization of rights. Through the dynamic interplay between legitimizing and exposing, they translate embodied realities and relations in and of place into a sense of purpose and direction for mobilizing a wider network of governance actors. On this basis, the paper contributes a social accountability perspective to place leadership studies. MAD statement This paper aims to Make a Difference (MAD) by exploring how social movement actors contribute to collective place leadership through constructing and contesting the meanings of local governance issues and relationships. The paper highlights how social movement actors illuminate place as the objective and measurable built environment, and as subjectively experienced and constituted as places of heritage and community but also dislocation and trauma. That they use social audits to interrogate governance failures and legitimize communities’ situated knowledge suggests such social accountability initiatives offer a space for place leadership outside of but also interacting with broader governance networks.