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Accountability is usually expressed along a horizontal and vertical dimension. The former is concerned with the system of checks and balances, while the latter focuses on periodical elections and systems of control (O’Donnell, 1999). Social accountability puts forward a complementary mechanism of ongoing participatory control that relies on its proxies of public interest, namely civil society, the media, and business sector, to raise public awareness, advocate, expose, and exert watchdog functions through social accountability mechanisms. The core social accountability mechanisms include: access to information, creating space for debate and voice, and negotiation for change (World Bank, 2006). The purpose of this paper is to examine the social accountability proxies for public interest efforts in the Arab region to analyze the efficacy of their mechanisms and their ability to access to information, advocate and negotiate, in addition to the challenges they perceive as facing citizen voice in their states.

Those surveyed were 206 members of civil society, media professionals, academia and business associations specialized in the fields of economic development, social development, economic reporting, governance and other related fields.

The findings show that the Arab states generally are characterized by political and socioeconomic factors; particularly their paternalistic nature tends to manifest an imbalance in the accountability cycle.

Increased access to information and in particular to budgets creates the basis for negotiation and social accountability, as the ability to take informed decisions will be enhanced. Thus making access to information a primary mechanism as it is also an empowering tool for advocacy and negotiation.

This chapter examines the ways in which the provision of training and development for leaders and managers in Cairo underwent profound change during the Arab Spring. It provides an important insight into the capacity of higher education institutes (HEIs) to respond to social and political movements and to the ways in which we might frame education and training.

The chapter draws directly on the experience of the author and her colleagues as they responded to the explicit and implicit needs of the social movements on the streets of Cairo during the Arab Spring of 2011.

The chapter illustrates the extent to which HEIs can be responsive to expressed needs and it offers insights and understandings of the professional relationships between colleagues and participants as they seek to co-construct a new curriculum.

The chapter examines important social change through the perspective of an HEI whose values are ones of promoting learning and professional development in a context where such ideas and concepts are being explicitly challenged and rewritten.

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of the Arab Spring on public administration programs in Egypt, with a special focus on executive education programs.

The study draws on stakeholder analysis, and uses both primary and secondary data.

The author describes the impact of the Arab Spring on executive education in Egypt and methods of dealing with the crises.

Egypt is still in a phase of transition, which implies further changes are likely to occur in the current situation, which may be worthy of further study.

This study provides an overview of the challenges to executive education in Egypt during its transitional period with an overview of the underlying opportunities.