This driver captures the increasing influence of compliance, risk management, and accountability structures in shaping how development work is designed, funded, and delivered. As donor systems have become more formalized and risk-sensitive, organizations are required to meet tighter reporting requirements, stricter procurement processes, heightened due diligence, and stronger demands for measurable outcomes. These changes are largely driven by political scrutiny in donor countries, concerns about corruption and misuse of funds, and the need to demonstrate value for money. While these systems are intended to strengthen accountability, they have also created unintended consequences by favoring larger, well-resourced organizations, excluding smaller and community-based actors, slowing innovation, and shifting attention from meaningful impact to reporting performance. In many cases, compliance has become a parallel system of work, with teams spending considerable time on paperwork, audits, and documentation rather than addressing the underlying challenges.
As a result, accountability increasingly becomes upward-facing to funders rather than outward-facing to communities. This has created a growing tension between the need for flexibility in complex, adaptive environments and rigid accountability frameworks that assume predictability. As development systems become more complex and uncertain, this tension continues to intensify, raising a fundamental question about whether accountability systems can evolve to support trust, learning, and adaptation rather than focusing primarily on control and risk minimization.
