DOES PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY WORK? AN ASSESSMENT TOOL

In recent years, there has been a drive to strengthen existing public accountability arrangements and to design new ones. This prompts the question whether accountability arrangements actually work. In the existing literature, both accountability ‘deficits’ and ‘overloads’ are alleged to exist. However, owing to the lack of a cogent yardstick, the debate tends to be impressionistic and event‐driven. In this article we develop an instrument for systematically assessing public accountability arrangements, drawing on three different normative perspectives. In the democratic perspective, accountability arrangements should effectively link government actions to the ‘democratic chain of delegation’. In the constitutional perspective, it is essential that accountability arrangements prevent or uncover abuses of public authority. In the learning perspective, accountability is a tool to make governments effective in delivering on their promises. We demonstrate the use of our multicriteria assessment tool in an analysis of a new accountability arrangement: the boards of oversight of agencies.     

Localism and Accountability in a Post-Collaborative Era: Where Does It Leave the Community Right to Challenge?

Since the establishment of subsidiarity in the early 1990s, the European-wide move to devolve governance has been interpreted by previous and present UK governments adopting differing ideological positions within a ‘localism agenda’. Interpretations have changed the dynamics of the community right to challenge, as well as the structure and mechanisms for community accountability. This article adopts the typology of forms of local governance developed by Lowndes and Sullivan (2008, How low can you go? Rationales and challenges for neighbourhood governance. Public Administration, 86 (1), 1–22) to explore the hypothesis that the localism agenda realigns the synergy between neighbourhood rationales; citizen engagement in service delivery and the opportunity for public scrutiny and accountability. It concludes that opportunities for communities to challenge service delivery and ensure increased accountability to the local level will be tempered by increased complexity and demands on local authorities to develop new relationships with both service users and providers.     

Accountability and hybridity in welfare governance

Hybridity has become a central characteristic of accountability in public governance. Contemporary service delivery is increasingly defined by the mixing and layering of public, market and social accountability regimes operating as overlapping ‘hybrid’ accountability arrangements. Although hybrid accountability is not a new phenomenon, recent trends have accelerated the process of hybridization, particularly in welfare state governance. In this symposium, we seek to advance our understanding of the under-theorized concept of hybrid accountability and empirically examine what is actually going on. In this introductory article, we put forward a definition of what hybridity means in public welfare governance and explore its origins and dynamics. We then present the articles of this symposium, showing how they go beyond fixed and static typologies to grasp the dynamics of interactions between actors, values and mechanisms under hybrid accountability. We conclude by reflecting on a future research agenda for studying hybrid accountability arrangements.     

THE PARTICIPATORY AND DEMOCRATIC POTENTIAL AND PRACTICE OF INTEREST GROUPS: BETWEEN SOLIDARITY AND REPRESENTATION

Embracing ‘groups’ as means to address democratic deficiencies invites scrutiny of their democratic practices. However, many groups lack internal democratic practices and offer few opportunities for affiliates to participate. Guided by an implicit ‘representation’ narrative of groups, the absence of internal democratic practices is interpreted as a sign of ‘failure’ or ‘deficiency’. Some scholars have entertained the idea of setting minimum standards of internal democracy as a prerequisite for policy access. This article scrutinizes this emerging consensus and its ‘representation’ narrative. Drawing upon the work of O’Neill (2001) and Pitkin (1967) , it is argued that groups can also be viewed through a lens of solidarity. This paper argues that the type of constituency a group advocates for can be used to calibrate expectations of internal democratic structures of accountability and authorization. The concepts of ‘representation’ and ‘solidarity’ are used to make sense of the (changeable) practices of a variety of groups.     

Changing Forms of Accountability in Education? A Case Study of LEAs in Wales

Political mechanisms of accountability were marginalized by Conservative government reforms during the 1980s and 1990s which sought a more market-oriented approach within the public sector in order to enhance ‘consumerism’. In education, parents were given more choice between schools and were provided with more information on school performance. The promotion of market accountability has involved a reduction in the powers of local education authorities (LEAs) which had been central to the operation of political accountability. However, whilst market-based forms of accountability were firmly enhanced in principle by the legislation, to what extent have the forms of accountability operating within LEAs changed in practice? Interviews with Chief Officers and the Chair of the Education Committee are used to identify changing perceptions and practices of accountability in LEAs in Wales. The findings indicate that although local politicians and officials have been forced to operate within the legislative framework of market accountability, they have sought to impede its successful implementation. The policy community in Wales facilitated the LEAs’ capacity to respond in this way. The market-based reforms conflicted with fundamental values held in Wales, which remain those of professional accountability.     

Parliamentary scrutiny of executive patronage: The relationship between institutional norms,reputation and accountability

While executive patronage brings important benefits in terms of governance and control, political influence over the selection of agency staff entails a democratic dilemma: how should the exercise of executive patronage be controlled? This article addresses this critical issue, examining Westminster's system of pre-appointment scrutiny by analysing an original database that encompasses every pre-appointment hearing held between 2007 and 2018. The article demonstrates that although the conduct of hearings accords with select committees’ longstanding commitment to cross-party working, members have not prioritized pre-appointment scrutiny relative to their other committee activities. By systematically disaggregating the factors which affect how select committees dispatch this account-holding responsibility, the article deepens previous analyses of pre-appointment scrutiny, and dovetails with scholarship examining the institutional determinants of select committee power. More broadly, it draws attention to the reputational dynamics of accountability, and how institutional norms can serve as vital reputational resources, enabling account-holders to demonstrate ‘responsible’ account-holding.     

Discretion drift in primary care commissioning in England: Towards a conceptualization of hybrid accountability obligations

In the context of welfare delivery, hybrid organizations mix public and ‘new’ market, social, and professional types of mechanisms and rationales. This article contributes to our understanding of accountability within hybrid organizations by highlighting how accountability obligations can become hybrid, simultaneously formal and informal. Instead of seeing accountability as hybrid only in the sense of the coexistence of types of organizational mechanisms and structures (i.e., the prevalence of both state and market types), we examine accountability arrangements governing a hybrid model—primary care commissioning in England—and interrogate the relationships between accountability actors and their accountability forums. We conceptualize ‘hybrid accountability obligations’ as a state whereby the nature of obligation underpinning accountability relationships is both formal-informal and vertical-horizontal concurrently. The article concludes by highlighting the consequences of this kind of hybridity, namely how it extended discretion from welfare delivery to the domain of welfare governance.     

SCRUTINIZING PERFORMANCE: HOW ASSESSORS REACH JUDGEMENTS ABOUT PUBLIC SERVICES

Strengthening the accountability and improving the performance of public services is an important issue in many countries. A common response is to impose elaborate oversight or scrutiny arrangements. While we know a good deal about the formal operation of these arrangements, we know much less about the informal practices of scrutiny bodies and how they make judgements. This paper investigates scrutiny processes in three national audit bodies, three service inspectorates, and two inquiry committees in the UK. Judgement processes were analyzed along five dimensions: intuitive to analytical thinking; implicit to explicit assessment criteria; inductive and deductive methods; internal and external validity; and the principles used to make and evaluate judgements. These processes varied considerably, suggesting the need for a broader conception of the nature of and influences on scrutiny processes, which recognizes the inherent tensions in these processes and the skills required by those who engage in them.     

THE IMPACT OF OPEN DATA IN THE UK: COMPLEX,UNPREDICTABLE, AND POLITICAL

This article examines the democratic impact of the UK coalition government's Transparency Agenda, focusing on the publication of all local government spending over £500 by councils in England. It looks at whether the new data have driven increased democratic accountability, public participation, and information transmission. The evidence suggests that the local government spending data have driven some accountability. However, rather than forging new ‘performance regimes’, creating ‘armchair auditors’, or bringing mass use and involvement, the publication creates a further element of political disruption. Assessment of the use and impact of the new spending data finds it is more complex, more unpredictable, and more political than the rhetoric around Open Data indicates. The danger is that the gap between aims and impact invites disappointment from supporters.     

Explaining and Justifying Authoritative Decisions: The Case of Controversial Facilities for the Homeless in Rotterdam

Abstract

This article analyses the ways in which local executive leaders rendered account for the decisions taken on where to locate 19 controversial facilities for the homeless in the Dutch city of Rotterdam. Despite the non-participatory nature of the decision-making process, executive leaders acquired a remarkable level of authority for their decisions. The analysis suggests that the accountability strategies employed by local executive leaders contributed substantially to this success. Specific ways of rendering account for the decisions made concerning the locations enabled local executives to develop the political repertoires necessary to make the authoritative decisions they deemed indispensable. Most important among these ways were the executives' recognition of the importance of forming direct, informal accountability relationships with local residents, the proactive rendering of account and the executives' partial control over the forums to which account was rendered. The author concludes that an authoritative ‘Decide - Announce - Defend’ approach may not yet be out of fashion in modern local governance. The findings suggest that we will better understand the practice of public accountability if we supplement the existing conceptual frameworks for analysing and assessing public accountability arrangements with an alternative conception of accountability that focuses on the strategic aspects of rendering account. ^{1 1.}?An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2009 EGPA Permanent Study Group Local Governance and Democracy, in the section themed New Forms of Local Democracy. The author thanks two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier version of the article.      

Parliaments in Disguise? How German Councillors perceive Local Councils

Dominant narratives of neighbourhood working in the United Kingdom accentuate the diversity and ‘messiness’ of practices across local authorities. This paper questions such narratives. Drawing upon a study of 15 local authorities, we first argue that neighbourhood working is increasingly oriented towards neighbourhood management, privileging the ‘joining up’ of mainstream service delivery over the enhanced community engagement and political accountability more associated with the practices of neighbourhood governance. Deploying Lowndes and Sullivan's four rationales of neighbourhood working (2008), in combination with Mintzberg's metaphor of organisation as ‘structure in fives’ (1983), we suggest that the practices of neighbourhood working are currently best understood in terms of Mintzberg's decentralised divisional authority as a form of constrained decentralisation in which semi-autonomous divisions are brought together under a central administration and given limited control over service delivery in order to address the social and economic rationales for neighbourhood working. We then draw upon recent neo-liberal critiques of local governance to offer a critical evaluation of both the appeal for local officers and politicians of neighbourhood management and the potential tensions and contradictions of such a move for future policy and practice. We conclude that neighbourhood management as a neo-liberal ‘roll-out’ strategy may be self-defeating, surfacing the incapacity of local authorities to respond to local community expectations and grievances, whilst exposing the organisational constraints of partnership working, managerialism and outsourcing.     

Critical peacebuilding and the dilemma of difference: the stigma of the ‘local’ and the quest for equality

Recent research has revealed the need to include and understand local actors in order to improve the effectiveness of peacebuilding. According to these analyses, peacebuilding could become more respectful of cultural differences thanks to a genuine engagement with the specificities of the local. Empirical studies of the ‘different’ local have thus flourished in the field with the ambition of countering the universalist tendency of traditional peacebuilding. Through the use of the concept of ‘dilemma of difference’, this article challenges this intuitive argument and argues that these approaches risk reproducing a stigma attached to the ‘different’ local. Indeed, emphasising difference in order to ensure its respect means separating and reifying ‘it’ as a deviation from the norm(al). As such, this analytical strategy is likely to recreate the stigma that contributed to the exclusion of local actors in previous peacebuilding practice and research. In contrast, I outline three strategies for studying difference differently in peacebuilding: focusing on the institutional arrangements that enabled specific differences to emerge and become visible; recognising that these differences are internal to peacebuilding (and thus an unlikely source of alternative and emancipation); and revealing the unstated and implicit Self for/from whom local difference is relevant.     

Anti-corruption or accountability? International efforts in post-conflict Liberia

This paper analyses anti-corruption efforts in post-conflict Liberia. It highlights citizens’ views on the definition of corruption and argues that, in the past, anti-corruption efforts have often focused on institution building and formal justice mechanisms without sufficient understanding of accountability dynamics on the ground. Anti-corruption approaches in Liberia have only nominally examined whether there is a shared understanding of what ‘corruption’ is and why it is regarded as a problem. The paper examines the social norms and perceptions that underlie understandings of the term corruption. It argues that the international community may have overlooked the fact that ‘corruption’ has become an all-encompassing term that masks a myriad of differing priorities and concerns. The authors posit that ‘accountability’ may be a more useful lens for those actors hoping to improve governance in these contexts.     

Focusing on quality care rather than ‘checking boxes’: How to exit the labyrinth of multiple accountabilities in hybrid healthcare arrangements

Accountability relations in modern-day welfare states have multiplied due to the complex interaction of institutional and sectoral logics. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to unravel complexities which surround accountability relations in hybrid healthcare arrangements. For this purpose, a framework of multi-faceted identity is suggested in order to theoretically grasp multiple accountabilities of healthcare professionals. Accordingly, healthcare professionals have a cross-cutting identity (being a professional) that is fortified with nested identities such as the one of partner, citizen and manager. Each identity facet is attached to a specific accountability form such as professional and civic society accountability. By focusing on three settings of healthcare provision—hospital, outpatient and integrated care—the usefulness of a multi-faceted identity framework will be illustrated. It is concluded that developing a more nuanced understanding of healthcare professionals’ multiple identities and attached accountabilities might be a good starting point for planning healthcare redesign.     

Participatory development and empowerment: The dangers of localism

Recent discussions in development have moved away from holistic theorisation towards more localised, empirical and inductive approaches. In development practice there has been a parallel move towards local ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’, which has produced, albeit with very different agendas, a high level of agreement between actors and institutions of the ‘new’ Left and the ‘new’ Right. This paper examines the manifestations of this move in four key political arenas: decentralised service delivery, participatory development, social capital formation and local development, and collective actions for ‘radical democracy’. We argue that, by focusing so heavily on ‘the local’, the see manifestations tend to underplay both local inequalities and power relations as well as national and transnational economic and political forces. Following from this, we advocate a stronger emphasis on the politics of the local, ie on the political use of ‘the local’ by hegemonic and counter-hegemonic interests.     

Principal,Agent or Bystander? Governance and Leadership in Chinese and Russian Villages

Abstract

What does ‘local self-governance’ mean in post-communist Russia and China? In order to answer this question, the article focuses on village-level governance in both countries by employing a four-fold typology of village leadership in public affairs. In both countries, the withdrawal of state power from local communities and the introduction of legislative ‘self-government’ has not brought autonomy to the local and community levels. The findings here suggest that the single ‘state agent’ category of village leadership that emerged under the communist regime is shifting to become one of the remaining three types, ‘principal’, ‘local agent’ and ‘bystander’. There was a growing tendency towards a non-autonomous type of ‘bystander’-style leadership in China and the ‘local agent’ type in Russia. This article suggests that the development of these local governance styles should not be attributed to a common transitional process departing from the communist past, but is the outcome of four factors that influence village leaders in two countries: administrative distance between local and village level, village social structure, fiscal arrangements and electoral relationships.     

Beyond the Policy-Implementation Gap: How the City of Johannesburg Manufactured the Ungovernability of Street Trading

Abstract

Contemporary cities are said to have become ‘ungovernable’, especially in the Global South. They are certainly more difficult to govern due to the complexification of states’ apparatus (under the double dynamics of neoliberalisation and decentralisation), cities’ larger size, massive poverty, and informality. Yet, the ungovernability thesis arguably stems from a theoretical shift, from local government to urban governance, that has rendered the questions of steering, political choices, and accountability almost impossible to conceptualise. Unpacking the policy instruments used to govern street trading in Johannesburg, the paper shows that its so-called ‘ungovernability’ was largely manufactured by municipal choices.     

UNHCR and the pursuit of international protection: accountability through technology?

Better management and new technological solutions are increasingly portrayed as the way to improve refugee protection and enhance the accountability of humanitarian actors. Taking concepts of legibility, quantification and co-production as the point of departure, this article explores how techno-bureaucratic practices shape conceptions of international refugee protection. We do this by examining the evolving roles of results-based management (RBM), biometrics and cash-based interventions as ‘accountability technologies’ in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ international protection efforts. The article challenges the assumption that these technologies produce a seamless form of accountability that is equally attentive to donor requests and the protection needs of refugees. By focusing on how the constitution of these techniques as ‘accountability solutions’ shapes conceptions of the very meaning of protection (ie the problem to be addressed), we also show what dimensions of protection get omitted in this co-production of technical solutions and socio-political problems.     

Good governance or muddling through? Layoffs and employment reform in socialist China

China’s socialist employment system has undergone radical changes since the 1990s along with enterprise restructuring. Surplus workers have been laid off from state-owned enterprises in large numbers. China’s policy program for the management of layoffs in this process of enterprise restructuring has been evaluated as an example of ‘good practices in labor administration’. In this paper, we use original field data collected in Beijing, supplemented by additional information from recent Chinese studies, to assess this evaluation. We apply for this purpose the criteria often used by development agencies to evaluate governance systems, namely, accountability, transparency, consistency, participation, and information flow. Using these criteria as a yardstick, we argue that the Chinese experience in reforming their employment system through massive layoffs and re-employment is better characterized as a classic case of ‘muddling through’ rather than a shining example of ‘good governance’.