Abstract

Local government accountability in Bangladesh operates within a dense web of cultural norms, social hierarchies, and historically embedded patronage arrangements that constrain or, in some circumstances, enable governance outcomes. This thematic review synthesises 62 peer-reviewed and credible grey-literature sources published between 2000 and 2025, screened through a PRISMA-informed search and coding process, to examine how cultural factors shape accountability in Bangladeshi local government institutions. Five interconnected themes are identified inductively: patronage politics and factional loyalty; gendered norms constraining women’s substantive political participation; religious and communal norms mediating civic engagement; elite capture facilitated by social deference; and bureaucratic culture perpetuating weak downward accountability. Unlike earlier treatments that risk presenting culture as a fixed and determining variable, this review reads each theme through a feminist institutionalist and intersectional lens and situates cultural explanations alongside political economy, institutional design, and electoral competition, treating culture as one interacting variable among several rather than a master explanation. The review finds that these mechanisms combine into a self-reinforcing but not immutable arrangement, a cultural equilibrium of non-accountability, that formal reforms have struggled to dislodge because they rarely engage the normative environment directly. Civil society organisations, independent media, and citizen-led digital initiatives are identified as partial counterweights, though their reach remains uneven. The review concludes that durable reform requires institutional redesign to be paired with deliberate, sustained engagement with the cultural assumptions that define legitimate authority, and it offers a set of comparative propositions that extend beyond the Bangladesh case to other clientelistic democracies undergoing decentralisation.