The politics of complaint: a review of the literature on grievance redress mechanisms in the global South

Institutionalized complaint systems are notable features of improving  public programmes and government practice. This article reviews  literature on formal grievance redress mechanisms in the global South to  understand whether these mechanisms help the aggrieved to complain and  seek redress for their grievances. In this emerging literature, the  institutional and definitional boundaries of formal grievance mechanisms  are slippery; systems that look like grievance systems may do little to  enable complaints by those who seek to register them, and even less to  enable them to achieve redress; with limited evidence on how these  formal grievance systems work on the ground, and without sufficient  power to act on complaints these formal grievance systems appear to be  more ornamental; and where they have worked uncommonly well they have  not always attracted political support to go to scale. The article  concludes with a discussion of avenues for research identified through  this literature review.