July 3, 2023
A New Decade of Complaints
By Samer Araabi
The Console now includes all complaint data though 2022. Has anything substantively changed since January 2020?
This March, the Accountability Counsel Research Team completed a year-long project to update all Independent Accountability Mechanism (IAM) complaint data through the end of 2022. We have added 226 new complaints filed since Jan 2021, and updated 253 complaints that were still active or in monitoring at the time of the last update. The new data brings our total number of logged complaints to 1,802, covering 29 years of complaint data across 141 countries.
Of these complaints, 309 (about 17% of the total) have been filed since January 2020. Three years isn't a lot of data, but it's perhaps enough to start looking at whether complaints filed since the start of the decade are looking any different from historical precedent. Below we'll explore what aspects of complaint data can reasonably be compared, and what might require a few more years before we have a good grip on the post-2020 landscape.
Registration & Eligibility
Registration rates appear to have increased slightly since 2020, rising from an average of 61% to 66%. For complaints that passed registration (or in mechanisms without a distinct registration stage), the eligibility rate for complaints also appears to have increased, from 56% pre-2020 to 58% since. However, even these rather basic comparisons are a bit tricky. Much of our information on unregistered complaints comes from disclosures in annual reports, but some mechanisms, including the IFC CAO, have not yet published annual reports since 2020 (thoughin the CAO's case, monthly case update pdfs do contain new complaint data). Other mechanisms, such as the AFD Environmental and Social Complaints Mechanism, simply haven't published any complaint information since 2020, a particularly worrying phenomenon.
However, for mechanisms with up-to-date reporting, we've seen a significant uptick in eligibility. The IDB's Independent Consultation and Investigation Mechanism witnessed an increase from 60% to 79%, and the EIB's Complaints Mechanism rose from 67% to 76%. Such increased eligibility rates are a clear sign that a mechanism is either engaging with a broader range of complainants, or better explaining its mandate and restrictions to potential filers.
There has been a surprising change in the issues raised in complaints since 2020. One positive change has been a significant drop in the number of complaints with unknown issues, largely a result of IAMs failing to disclose information on ineligible or unregistered complaints (though this can also be the product of requests for anonymity). 37% of complaints filed before 2020 had no information on the issues raised by complainants, a number that has since dropped to just below 30%.
Perhaps the most notable development, however, is that for the first time in the history of IAM complaints, the number one issue raised is not consultation, disclosure, or due diligence. Since 2020, the most common concern of complainants appears to be displacement (physical or economic). Consultation and disclosure is still the second most common issue, but concerns about material harm, including environmental harm and property damage, have risen precipitously.
The proportion of complaints raising retaliation concerns has also doubled, from 3% to 6%, a worrying trend that mirrors the primary findings of our report on complaints filed in the Middle East and North Africa.
Lastly, it is worth noting that explicit concerns around gender and gender-based violence remain very low, though this may well be an issue of underreporting rather than an accurate measure of the prevalence of these issues. More research would be needed to determine how factors like societal barriers to raising these issues or IAMs' own categorization decisions impact this statistic.
Why Complaints Don't Succeed
Three years of data from the 2020s isn't enough to responsibly draw any conclusions about how complaints are faring overall; given that complaints on average take over 3 years to produce outputs, it will be several more years before we have an accurate picture of how complaints filed in this decade are (or are not) being resolved. For similar reasons we won't be diving into commitment data for new complaints just yet, given how few new commitments currently exist. Nonetheless, we can take a preliminary look at the reasons given by mechanisms for closing complaints.
Once again we see a significant drop in the number of "unknowns," meaning that mechanisms are doing a better job of reporting when and why a complaint closes.
However, the proportion of complaints closed for not meeting the so-called "good-faith requirement," have skyrocketed. "Good faith" requirements require complainants to demonstrate that they have exhausted all other available options (courts, project level grievance mechanisms, etc.) before filing a complaint with an IAM. The uptick in good faith exclusions is due almost exclusively to a 33% increase in the proportion of complaints closed for this reason at the IAM of Asian Development Bank, and a stunning 90% increase in its use at the Inter-American Development Bank's MICI.
The findings presented above are preliminary and subject to change as more complaint data is added in the coming years. However, if the data holds, then we are witnessing at least two important trends in the complaints ecosystem.
On the one hand, a sharp reduction in "unknown" data points to significantly better reporting on complaint data from IAM registries, a welcome development that will certainly help shed light on the inner workings of these accountability processes. More open data will allow to find bottlenecks, uplift successful strategies, suggest improvements, and in so doing improve both the possibility of communities accessing remedy, and the efficacy by which IAMs are able to facilitate it.
On the other hand, the increased incidence of communities reporting material harm, and the increased barriers placed by some mechanisms on communities' access to these processes, may imply that things on the ground are more dangerous than ever before, without a proportionate commitment by accountability mechanisms to support those directly facing such dangers.