Image from Canva. This brief was re-posted from the Transparency and Accountability Initiative website.

We lay out an approach for how donors and practitioners can more usefully engage with evidence to inform their work on information and non-electoral accountability. The focus of this approach is twofold: be more precise in specifying accountability actors of interest, and look for evidence from contexts that are similar to where you want to work in terms of how your accountability actors of interest relate to one another. In this brief we explain these points in more detail, and provide a step-by-step approach to applying solutions in context, including an online pilot tool.

This is a work in progress and feedback is welcome through mitgovlab@mit.edu.

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The Learning from Evidence series documents a learning process undertaken by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative to engage with and utilize the evolving evidence base in support of our members’ transparency and accountable governance goals. We are pleased to have partnered with MIT’s Governance Lab and Twaweza on this initiative. This series comprises a variety of practice- and policy-relevant learning products for funders and practitioners alike, from evidence briefs, to more detailed evidence syntheses, to tools to support the navigation of evidence in context.