By – Vansh Aggarwal

Abstract

This article examines how the Global North’s fixation on formal compliance frameworks, from human rights monitoring to anti-corruption laws, often misreads the Global South’s contextually rooted mechanisms of accountability. It argues that these Northern paradigms, built on institutional transparency and quantifiable governance indices, fail to capture informal, community-driven, and restorative modes of justice that sustain legitimacy in the South.

Introduction:

“You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking” — Lyndon B. Johnson.

Global governance increasingly judges states by scores and indices. The World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) report six aggregate governance dimensions for over 200 economies and have become central to how donors and analysts talk about “good governance.” Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) ranks 180 countries on a 0–100 scale and is widely cited in policy debates. These tools make distant problems legible. They also shape incentives. When reputation, loans, or aid hinge on a score, states and programmes begin to chase metrics. This article argues that an uncritical global reliance on Northern-style compliance frameworks often misreads how the Global South builds accountability. Many Southern practices deliver legitimacy and social protection in ways that metrics and Western legal forms fail to capture. 

Why indicators became dominant, and their limits:

From the 1990s onward, indicators offered a tempting solution to policymakers who wanted comparability and simple diagnostics. The WGI aggregates dozens of underlying data sources to produce six governance indices, while the CPI draws on expert and business surveys to estimate perceived corruption. These instruments are powerful because they translate complex realities into single numbers that are easy to communicate and to use in conditional lending, technical assistance, and media narratives.

But numbers have limits. Indicators compress history, relationships, and local practices into scores that privilege evidence legible to Western bureaucracies. Scholars warn that when indicators become the dominant language of reform, they risk silencing other knowledge systems and reshaping what counts as “real” governance. Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls this silencing “epistemicide,” and scholars such as Sally Engle Merry have documented how indicators translate social life into metrics that often privilege outsiders’ views. Moreover, Transparency International itself has flagged worrying trends. The 2024 CPI found that more than two-thirds of countries scored below 50 on a 0–100 scale, underscoring both the prevalence of corruption and the limits of perception-based measures. 

The Global South’s plural practices of accountability:

Calling the Global South “non-compliant” overlooks a range of functioning accountability mechanisms that do not resemble Western legal institutions. Two concrete and widely documented examples show this clearly: India’s Lok Adalat system and Kenya’s constitutional recognition of alternative dispute resolution.

India’s Lok Adalats are state-supported forums for mediation and negotiated settlement. In 2023–24, Lok Adalats reportedly disposed of 80,760,028 pre-litigation cases out of about 154,446,426 taken up, achieving a national disposal rate of roughly 52 percent in that category. These hearings reduce court backlogs and deliver negotiated outcomes that parties often accept. Such settlements can restore social relationships and reduce the long-term costs of litigation, yet they rarely register as “rule-of-law” victories in indicators that privilege adversarial, precedent-based judgments.

Kenya’s 2010 Constitution explicitly directs courts to promote alternative dispute resolution and acknowledges the role of customary law, subject to constitutional safeguards. In many regions, customary forums handle land and family conflicts with an emphasis on social harmony and locally legitimate remedies. Where central courts are distant or overloaded, community mechanisms provide timely dispute resolution that most residents accept.

Beyond dispute settlement, Southern welfare delivery often blends formal and informal systems in ways that North-centred frameworks do not measure well. Brazil’s Bolsa Família and successor programmes have demonstrated that large conditional cash-transfer systems can reach millions, reduce poverty, and be adapted to fiscal and political constraints. The World Bank documents Bolsa Família’s role in poverty reduction and its influence on global social policy thinking. India has piloted universal basic income experiments and scaled digital transfer systems that aim to improve accuracy and portability for informal workers. Evaluations of basic income pilots in Madhya Pradesh reported measurable gains in food security, schooling, and household investments during short pilots. These initiatives show that Southern states are not merely passive recipients of Northern models. They are actively experimenting with hybrid solutions that fit high informality and mobility.

Why the North misreads Southern practices:

The mismatch stems from three interlinked tendencies. First, many global indices implicitly equate form with function. If a state lacks Western-style audits, written judicial decisions, or publicly accessible registers, the index treats it as weak. Second, the evidence favored by these measures reflects Northern bureaucratic norms, paper trails, formal procedures, and quantitative outputs, while oral agreements, mediated settlements, and community enforcement remain outside the counting frame. Third, the actors who design metrics often exclude local practitioners from the process, producing measurement tools that reflect outsiders’ priorities rather than lived realities.

When donors and lenders base decisions on such indices, they create incentives that may narrow policy space. Projects that are easy to report on rise in priority. Long-term investments in trust, community capacity, and informal dispute systems lose out to short-term initiatives that improve rankings. This dynamic can produce cosmetic reforms that improve scores but leave everyday experiences of justice and welfare unchanged.

Welfare states in crisis: South vs North in perspective:

The theme “Welfare States in Crisis: Retrenchment, Reform, or Reinvention?” invites a comparative lens. In many Northern states, ageing demographics, rising healthcare costs, and political pressures have triggered debates about retrenchment and austerity. OECD social expenditure data show high levels of public spending in advanced economies and a long history of costly entitlement systems, which are now under strain as demographic and fiscal pressures grow. 

The Global South faces different constraints. High labour informality, internal migration, and weaker administrative reach. These conditions call for welfare models designed for portability, low administrative cost, and community trust. Hybrid approaches offer pathways of reinvention rather than pure retrenchment. For example, India’s Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) programmes have improved targeting and reduced leakages in some schemes, while Brazil’s cash transfer architecture has shown both resilience and adaptability under fiscal pressure. 

A pragmatic path: decolonising compliance without abandoning standards

Decolonising compliance means three practical shifts. First, adopt mixed-methods evaluation as standard practice. Quantitative indicators should be complemented by ethnographic fieldwork, beneficiary feedback mechanisms, and community-led metrics so that scores trigger inquiry rather than closure. Sally Engle Merry’s work on indicators argues precisely for an ethnography of indicators to see how they function in practice. 

Second, make hybrid institutions legible. Where mediated settlements and customary adjudications meet basic rights safeguards, register and record their outcomes. National justice statistics should include documented mediated outcomes alongside court judgments. This would bring scale-level practices like Lok Adalats into formal accounting without erasing their hybrid character. India’s official Lok Adalat reports provide a model of how mediated disposals can be aggregated and presented. 

Third, redesign donor financing to reward long-term relationship-building. Multi-year, flexible grants that recognise trust formation and community capacity will stabilize hybrid delivery systems. Donors can also incentivise co-design with local practitioners and civil society, ensuring metrics reflect local priorities rather than imposing outsider templates.

Conclusion:

The Global South is not a space awaiting Northern legal blueprints. It is a living laboratory of plural accountability and adaptive welfare designs. Indicators like the WGI and CPI play a useful role, but they must not become the single lens through which we judge policy success. By recognising epistemic plurality, recording hybrid practices, and retooling evaluation and finance, international and domestic actors can foster welfare-state reinvention that respects local realities while protecting rights. Measurement shapes reality. If we broaden what we measure, we widen what is possible. Will global institutions and domestic reformers change who gets to define compliance so that Southern practices of accountability become central to the next wave of welfare-state innovation?

Author’s Bio:

Vansh Vijay Aggarwal is a B.A. LL.B. student at Jindal Global Law School and a columnist at CNES.

Image Source : https://asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/asia-insight/india-pushes-global-south-goals-on-to-g-20-agenda