Abstract
International aid agencies are increasingly placing social accountability at the heart of their governance reform programmes. This involves a range of social activist mechanisms through which officials are rendered answerable to the public. In both democratic Philippines and authoritarian Cambodia, social accountability mechanisms supported by international aid projects have tended to be subordinated to liberal and/or morally based ideas of accountability that help preserve existing power hierarchies and limit the scope for critical evaluation of prevailing reform agendas. Where these ideologies dominate accountability coalitions, they also often privilege non-confrontational state-society partnerships, drawing activists into technical and administrative processes limiting political reform possibilities by marginalizing or replacing independent collective political action crucial to the democratic political authority of citizens.