What the People Want from the Democratic Decentralized Governance: The Quest for Accountability in Local Governments’ Service Provision in Ethiopia

Decentralization is a critical issue to revisit after more than a quarter of a century of governmental attempts [1]. The experimentation with decentralization never seems to come to an end as it still shows major gaps especially at the local level of governance-service delivery. The implementation of decentralized local governance in Ethiopia, which strives to change the government from above nature of the service delivery, proved a complex and difficult task for the African country with hundreds years of unitary governance and deep entrenched upward accountability structure which intern has made the public to develop strong public suspicion and mistrust towards the governance apparatus and hard to rectify these with two decades of attempts at decentralizing governance structures and service delivery. Providing incentives for the local government offices to adopt new instructions and changing their traditional service delivery practices are quite difficult. Literatures in the area have overlooked one variant of government accountability i.e. social accountability in the local governance, in that, most of the writings has been made on fiscal and political accountability of service provision. The main objective of this study is to investigate the social accountability of local government land administration service delivery in Ethiopia with a particular focus on Saharti- Samre rural woreda, Tigray regional state, as a case study area justified by the fact that the grass-root poor are found in the rural part and land administration, can serve a