The Contingencies of Societal Accountability: Examining the Link Between Civil Society and Good Government

Corruption interferes with and distorts the processes of political decision making and implementation, often to the disadvantage of the already disadvantaged. Yet our understanding of the factors that might propel a political system from lower to higher levels of probity remains speculative. This article examines the role of one category of actors often touted as an important countervailing force to political power: civil society. Existing case study research provides evidence that civil society can play a decisive role in holding public officials accountable, but that the success of such societal accountability is contingent upon a number of favorable contextual and institutional conditions. The analyses presented here use panel country data to examine whether the strength of civil society affects corruption. The results corroborate the findings of existing case studies; a vibrant civil society mitigates corruption but only provided that conditions such as political competition, press freedom, and government transparency exist in the country.     

Civil service management and corruption: What we know and what we don't

Numerous studies have linked a range of economic, social, and institutional variables with corruption in government. Yet, most of this literature overlooks the management of public officials themselves. This is a relevant omission: almost all corrupt exchanges involve public officials. This article reviews studies—36 in total—that do address civil service management and anti‐corruption. It finds that prior works assess a narrow set of civil service management structures. Meritocratic recruitment and, less robustly, pay levels have been associated with lower corruption. By contrast, robust evidence on how corruption relates to other established public personnel management areas—such as distinct pay structures (rather than levels), promotion, transfer, and job stability practices—is largely unavailable. The article thus calls for research assessing the effects of a broader set of civil service management practices to gain a deeper understanding of corruption, and how to curb it.     

Two Faces of Transparency: The Regulations of People’s Republic of China on Open Government Information

The People’s Republic of China enacted the first nationwide open government information regulations (OGIRs) in 2007. The regulations safeguard Chinese citizens’ right to know and provide public oversight. This analysis aims to explain how and why the Chinese government incorporates the universal values of transparency and accountability into the complex Chinese political systems. The article first provides a theoretical framework of government transparency and a quick road map of OGIRs for international audiences by tracing its regulatory details. It then analyzes OGIRs’ external mechanisms of transparency on how information flows to the citizenry through public supervision and judicial review. Fourthly, the article explains OGIRs’ internal mechanisms of transparency and accountability through the hierarchical control of the party-state agencies and officials. The article emphasizes that transparency and accountability are as important to today’s Chinese government and civil society as they are in democratic regimes generally. OGIR shares the values of external transparency and legislative missions of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). However, the Chinese government tailors information disclosure to meet the institutional requirement of strengthening internal accountability mechanisms, maintaining the party-state’s authority and legitimacy, and representing the collective welfare and public interest.     

Leading and recognizing public value

This article examines the relationship between leadership and public value, which is particularly challenging in a context of explicit contest and conflict. The theoretical framework is illustrated through a case study of policing rural crime. The study reveals that the police worked with multiple and competing publics rather than a single homogeneous public, and that part of their leadership role was to create and convene a public space in which different voices and divergent views could be expressed. The study notes that research needs to pay attention to the loss and displacement of public value, not solely its creation and recognition. The need to convene multiple publics required the police to lead, as part of a leadership constellation, and with political astuteness. The findings have wider relevance for other public services, and for studies of leadership and public value at the intersection between the state and civil society.     

Public value creation and appropriation mechanisms in public–private partnerships: How does it play a role?

Scholars have extensively investigated public value creation and appropriation concerning public services delivered strictly by the government and public–private arrangements, such as public–private partnerships (PPPs). However, such studies often focus on value for money and economic performance criteria. This study examines how public value can be created and appropriated in PPP settings and how public value mechanisms can influence these phenomena. Considering that the literature lacks an integrated and structured analytical framework to assess such phenomena, this conceptual article addresses four mainstream PPP topics regarding public value mechanisms (information sharing, public and private capabilities, risk governance, and stakeholder orientation), which can be associated with PPPs' public value creation (destruction) and appropriation (misappropriation). Thus, this article highlights a need to evaluate PPPs in terms of public value creation beyond the economic performance criteria and fills the literature gap by proposing a public value creation and appropriation framework.     

Constituting 'the public' in public participation

The emphasis on public participation in contemporary policy discourse has prompted the development of a wide range of forums within which dialogue takes place between citizens and officials. Often such initiatives are intended to contribute to objectives relating to social exclusion and democratic renewal. The question of ‘who takes part’ within such forums is, then, critical to an understanding of how far new types of forums can contribute to the delivery of such objectives. This article draws on early findings of research conducted as part of the ESRC Democracy and Participation Programme. It addresses three questions: ‘How do public bodies define or constitute the public that they wish to engage in dialogue?’; ‘What notions of representation or representativeness do participants and public officials bring to the idea of legitimate membership of such forums?’; and ‘How do deliberative forums contribute to, or help ameliorate, processes of social inclusion and exclusion?’     

“Let's organize”: The organizational basis for stable public governance

This study carries two distinct contributions to extant literature. Theoretically, it introduces an organizational approach to the study of public governance. Empirically, it demonstrates how the organizational architecture of government represents a stable and systemic capacity for public governance across time. The study establishes how stability serves as an enduring feature of public governance and how this is anchored in the organizational architecture of government systems. Moreover, structured flexibility is illustrated by how the civil service adapts to both international organizations and societal stakeholders. Theorizing the organizational dimension of public governance, this study also introduces a design tool that may be useful for deliberately (re)structuring public governance. Empirically, these arguments are probed by a sizable dataset with 13,173 observations across 40 years, consisting of nine surveys of civil servants at ministry and agency levels. The data enables a long-term perspective on government civil servants over nearly half a century, thus allowing for a comprehensive study of the organizational basis for public governance.     

When civil engagement is part of the problem: Flawed anti-corruptionism in Russia and Ukraine

In developing countries, the fight against corruption entails purges of political and business elites and the restructuring of electoral, financial, and social provision systems, all of which are costly for the incumbents and, therefore, unlikely without sustained pressure from civil society. In the absence of empirical analyses, scholars and practitioners have, therefore, assumes that civil society plays an unequivocally positive role in anti-corruptionism. In this article, we challenge this dominant assumption. Instead, we show that, under certain conditions, an engaged non-governmental community may, in fact, undermine the fight against corruption. Using the data from forty interviews with anti-corruption practitioners in Ukraine and Russia, as well as primary documentary sources, we present two models of anti-corruptionism whereby active civil engagement produces suboptimal outcomes. One is faux collaboration, defined as a façade of cooperation between the state and civil society, which hides the reality of one-sided reforms. The other model is that of non-collaborative co-presence, whereby the governance role is shared by the government and non-governmental activists without compromise-based solutions. In both cases, civil engagement helps perpetuate abuses of power and subvert such long-term goals of anti-corruption reforms as democratization and effective governance.     

THE SCOTT REPORT

The Scott report shows that the two most serious allegations made against ministers - that they conspired to sell lethal arms to Iraq in violation of government guidelines, and that they conspired to send innocent men to prison - are unfounded.
The inquiry violated the Salmon guidelines for the conduct of tribunals and is further evidence that an informal tribunal of this type is less well-equipped to examine a matter causing nation-wide public concern and to secure justice to individuals, than a statutory tribunal appointed under the Act of 1921.
Nevertheless, the Scott report raises three issues of fundamental constitutional importance - ministerial accountability to which the final section of the report is devoted, freedom of information which Sir Richard regards as a corollary of ministerial accountability, and the proper relationships between ministers and civil servants.
Sir Richard believes that constitutionally improper things occurred during the period which his inquiry covers. The fact that no minister or civil servant paid any penalty casts doubt as to whether ministerial accountability is a genuine convention of the constitution or a convenient fiction enabling both ministers and officials to evade responsibility.     

Civil Society and Good Governance in Bangladesh

Many of the recent ideas and concepts of ‘good governance’ and ‘civil society’ in Bangladesh have been generated by the international aid agencies and their ‘good governance’ policy agenda in the 1990s, but there are also local meanings to the terms derived from the independence struggle and the construction of a Bangladeshi state. This article aims to obtain a clearer analytical understanding of the processes and institutions of civil society in Bangladesh that can develop workable strategy to improve governance for helping the poor and moving beyond the patron–client relationships on which they have depended historically. It also focuses attention and debate on those aspects of civil society which can enhance the quality of governance and democracy by overcoming the western top-down approach; and can strengthen the role of civil society organisations to further enhance their impact on better governance for fair distribution of public goods and ensuring social justice for the poor.     

‘The Foreign Within’: State–Civil Society Relations in Russia

Abstract

The development of Russian civil society is linked to authoritarian government, fear of ‘colour revolutions’ and the ‘sovereign democracy’ that legitimises state control of civil society. This article acknowledges the narrowing room for manoeuvre of contemporary Russian civil society and discusses NGOs’ practices in the context of government pressures, the politicisation of transnational connections and the increasing geopolitical tension surrounding Russia. It describes the localisation and depoliticisation of Russian NGOs as well as their disruptive practices, and explains how narrowing civil society identities inform the self-governing of NGOs. Finally, it argues that seeing Russian civil society in simple dichotomies further narrows these identities.     

TRADITIONS OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT

This article explores local government traditions in the UK. This task is an important one for scholars who wish to understand and appreciate the rich cultural complexity of local government organizations. In local government settings, traditions can be used in the study and evaluation of political and managerial practices. They provide lenses through which the routines, structures and processes of management and politics may be viewed. The delineation of multiple traditions heightens the sense that local government is not a unified homogeneous organizational entity, but rather a melange of voices, interests and assumptions about how to organize, prioritize and mobilize action. They can be used to engage practitioners with the idea that different traditions inform political and managerial practices and processes in local councils. The approach embraces the significance of participants' constitutive stories about local government rather than the search for essential truths about the politics and management of the public sector.     

Public Accountability in Malaysia: Challenges and Critical Concerns

Despite its laudable roles in steering the process of socioeconomic development, government bureaucracy in Malaysia has not escaped public criticisms for its inefficiency, corruption, and failure to guard public interests. The media, civil society groups, intelligentsia, and the political opposition have successfully utilized the major scandals to highlight the growing public concern over the poor performance of the bureaucracy and its lack of accountability and responsiveness. This has provided impetus for the “clean and efficient government” movement initiated in the early 1980s and a series of subsequent efforts aimed at promoting appropriate values and ethics among public officials. Numerous rules and regulations have been framed, major reforms have been introduced in various spheres of administration, and an extensive program of training and bureaucratic reorientation has been undertaken. Despite all this, recent evidence suggests that the public service continues to suffer from problems of corruption and other irregularities. Obviously, the performance of numerous reforms in public service and the institutional mechanisms put in place for tackling ethical problems, though positive in general, has fallen short of expectations. This paper seeks to examine and analyze the present approach to combating corruption and promoting accountability in the Malaysian public service. In particular, it focuses on institutional mechanisms currently available and identifies and analyzes their constraints and limitations in keeping the public bureaucracy under surveillance and control.     

"Global Civil Society" and the Political Depoliticization of Global Governance

Activists, officials, and academics alike have often linked observations about an emerging global civil society to an incipient democratization of world politics. Global civil society is assumed to bring public scrutiny and "bottom-up" politics to international decision making "from outside" formal political institutions. Based on an analysis of uses of the concept of global civil society in 1990s global governance discourse (especially related to the major UN world conferences), this paper argues that the presumed democratization of world politics is better understood in terms of a double movement: on the one hand, "global civil society" depoliticizes global governance through the promotion of "human security" and "social development"; on the other hand, the emerging international public sphere (in the UN context) operates as a subsystem of world politics rather than opposing the system from outside. Practices of depoliticization are thus part of the political logic of (neo-)liberal global governance. The argument draws on Luhmann's systems theory and Foucault's analysis of governmentality.     

The Changing Facets of Public Administration in the United Arab Emirates

ABSTRACT

This article is an in-depth profile of the public administration system in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It specifically focuses on the relationship between the state, the market and civil society, the structure of the government and the civil service system and its functional areas. Reform initiatives undertaken in all these areas over the last decade have also been discussed. The findings reveal that the public administration system in the UAE has demonstrated considerable developments in facilitating the market forces, opening space for civil society and modernizing the civil service system.     

DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNANCE IN PAKISTAN'S FRAGMENTED SOCIETY

This paper examines Pakistan's recent democratic experiment in the framework of governance defined as the process of exercising power in the pursuit of common goals. Legitimacy, institutions and performance constitute the process of governance. Legitimacy refers to the consent of the governed and the rule of law. Institutions include deliberately created legal frameworks, laws, legislatures, executives and judiciary as well as customs, values and norms that emerge through practice. Effective governance requires congruence between the formal and informal institutions. Performance refers to the accomplishment of common objectives and judicious use and allocation of public resources. Good governance assumes the existence of democratic institutions. Governance occurs in a context and environment that not only shapes the process but over time is shaped by governing practices. The civil society and the market institutions provide the large part of the environment.     

Public Sector Added Value: Can Bureaucracy Deliver?

This paper takes stock of our understanding of the 'architecture' of public sector resource allocation mechanisms. It is a speculative venture and provides a framework for thinking about issues rather than a completed theoretical model. The concept of architecture is borrowed from the design sciences and is used to explore the conditions of performativity within networks of relational contracts. The age-old question of markets versus hierarchy is too simplistic. Instead, the search is for optimal complex network relationships that are based upon co-operation and participation rather than competition and control. Within these networks the public sector, it is argued, has a new role of acting as a broker in the creation of value. Judging the public sector's relative effectiveness in the creation of value also requires closer attention to be given to the context within which public sector managers take decisions. In particular it is necessary to acknowledge that they confront the 'wicked' problems of society that the electorate demand to be solved. This gives renewed interest in the notion of market failure.     

RAYNERISM IN PRACTICE: ANATOMY OF A RAYNER SCRUTINY

Rayner scrutinies have become a regular feature of life in government departments. It takes only a few months to conduct a scrutiny but implementation is a far longer process which can absorb much ministerial and official time. This paper describes one of the first Rayner scrutinies — on arrangements for paying social security benefits — from inception to implementation. It relates the scrutiny team's reports to the social security system it was in part reviewing and then traces the way that ministers and officials handled the controversy that the scrutiny team's proposals caused when leaked in an inaccurate form. It concludes by speculating about some wider lessons that might be drawn about the validity of the scrutiny technique; the value of the Rayner label on reviews; the need for independent reviews in bureaucratic organizations; civil service responsiveness to reviews: the political dimension to management issues: public debate and open government considerations, and the indirect consequences of scrutinies.     

MODERNIZATION AND SPORT: THE REFORM OF SPORT ENGLAND AND UK SPORT

This article evaluates the impact of New Labour's 'modernization project' on two key non-departmental public bodies for sport, Sport England and UK Sport. Our analysis concentrates on identifying the sources of the general momentum for modernization in the sport sector, how it has been interpreted by government in relation to the two organizations, the nature and consequences of modernization for both organizations, and the future of modernization. The analysis is informed by a range of public documents produced by government and by the two sports agencies, together with a series of seven interviews conducted with senior staff and members of Sport England and UK Sport and with senior civil servants in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Our conclusions suggest that modernization has resulted in a narrowing of the two organizations' objectives, the adoption of business-like principles and a 'command and control' regime in relationships with key frontline delivery partners.