Practitioner Points• Active state support for social accountability, although conducive to service improvements and enhanced governance, may not necessarily translate into opportunities for citizen empowerment.• State structures and processes often dominate the terms on which citizen input is solicited and responded to, which constrains the potential for social accountability to mobilize citizens around shared concerns and express them to public offi cials. State structures and processes also infl uence the capacity and incentives of local governments to be responsive.• Alignment between supply-and demand-side factors can promote mutual reinforcement for social accountability.• Sustainable social accountability mechanisms and processes emerge from extended interactions between citizens and state actors that support both learning and capacity building.

In January 2014, the Government of Indonesia issued Law 6/2014 on Villages, aiming to address weaknesses in the decentralisation paradigm, including providing villages with increased budget allocations and improved governance arrangements. Using longitudinal data from forty Indonesian villages in the three-round Local Level Institution studies, fielded in 1996, 2001 and 2012, the article investigates the effects that prior policy has had on village life and the likely implications of the new Village Law for village governance. The focus is on shifts in capacities, constraints and opportunities for the improved responsiveness of local governments toward community needs. We suggest that there is potential for the Law to increase responsivenessthrough a combination of strong financial management systems, new national institutional arrangements, and empowered citizens that can create pressures on the village government to work in the interest of the community-but that substantial risks and obstacles remain.

In fragile and conflict-affected states (FCS), governments must rebuild three core governance functions: provision of security, service delivery and political participation. We unpack the connection between service delivery and legitimacy, using a staged model of legitimation, in which progress on the governance functions forms the basis for value-based legitimacy; behavioural legitimacy may, but does not necessarily, follow. With data from Iraq, we explore the role of water services in laying the groundwork for legitimacy. The analysis underscores the complex, non-linear relationship between service delivery and increases in trust and legitimacy, and the process's sensitivity to starting points. Nascent governments can build legitimacy by improving service delivery; however, gains are contingent and often fragile.

The Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) measures students' progress towards reading. EGRA gauges early literacy skills through a 15-minute individual oral assessment of five fundamental reading skills. RTI worked with education experts to develop the EGRA in 2006, and it has been piloted and implemented in more than 40 countries. This volume aims to take stock of the substantial amount of information and experience generated through the use of EGRA, and to share this knowledge with practitioners, policymakers, and international donors. Chapters cover not only particular applications of the instrument but also put EGRA in the context of broader issues and developments in literacy and education.

In most poor countries, basic services in rural areas are less accessible and of lower quality than those in urban settings. In this article, we investigate the subnational geography of service delivery and its relationship with citizens' perceptions of their government by analyzing the relationship between service access, satisfaction with services and government, and the distance to urban centers for more than 21,000 survey respondents across 17 African countries. We confirm that access to services and service satisfaction suffer from a spatial gradient. However, distant citizens are less likely than their urban peers to translate service dissatisfaction into discontent with their government; distant citizens have more trust in government and more positive evaluations of both local and national officials. Our findings suggest that increasing responsiveness and accountability to citizens as a means of improving remote rural services may face more limits than promoters of democratic governance and citizen-centered accountability presume. | I NTRO DUC TIO NAvailability, access, and quality of services vary substantially around the world, and are often defining features of a country's level of development and state capacity. There is also huge variation within many countries. In most poor countries, basic services in rural areas are less accessible and of lower quality than those in urban settings. An influential stream of research has concentrated on this urban/ rural divide, arguing that development in many countries reflects an urban bias (Bates, 1981;Lipton, 1977). These arguments have been refined over time to incorporate variations in political systems, a broader conception of rural interests, factors that cross the divide (e.g., ethnic/religious identities), and the increased blurring of urban/rural boundaries (Allen, 2010;Varshney, 1998). Potter, Binns, Elliott, and Smith (2007) discuss the multiple "geographies of development" resulting from the interactions of people, places, resources, and institutions across space and time. In this article, we focus on the .