Social accountability initiatives seek to empower citizens to hold officials to account between and beyond elections, yet often meet with mixed results. This article highlights a neglected dimension in the study of accountability: intermediation by brokers who share and frame information. In contrast to literature that focuses on political brokers in clientelist networks, I introduce the concept of social brokerage: efforts to motivate and to link action by citizens and officials, without the expectation of an electoral return. I illustrate the practice of social brokerage in India, through study of a network of citizen journalists who attempt to mobilize citizen claim-making and to encourage official responsiveness to those claims. I argue that effective social brokerage requires both vernacularization (giving information meaning in local contexts) and interlocution (speaking to and between multiple audiences). This, in turn, rests upon a powerful—but often elusive—combination of community embeddedness and ties to bureaucracy.
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