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The Principle of Accountability
direct and explicit accountability relations between public agencies and civil actors.5 Agencies or individual public managers should feel obliged to account for their performance to the public at large or, at least, to civil interest groups, charities, and associations of clients.6 ‘Public accountability’ thus also stands for a regime of responsiveness and transparency in public agencies. This shift from internal to external accountability is often realized through public panels and public reporting. Accountability is intertwined here with the principles of transparency and participation. In the late 1990s, many public agencies established citizen charters, focus groups, and citizen panels to foster public accountability. In the Netherlands, for example, many agencies have set up small consumer panels or advisory boards with delegations of interest groups, which they can consult about performance or policy changes. Public reporting is another instrument for public accountability that has been adopted from the private sector. Agencies make their annual reports, their assessments, and their benchmarks publicly available, or they publish separate annual reports directed at a general audience. The fourth step is going from reporting about financial goals and issues to reporting about a broad range of public concerns. This shift is most visible in the private sector. Many large listed companies have begun publishing separate social and environmental annual reports in order to accommodate their critics and to express that they accept corporate social responsibility. These come under different labels: social and environmental reporting, sustainability reporting, and citizens reporting. This form of public accountability is still evolving. There are as yet no generally accepted standards for good governance or sustainability that can be used to assess the social responsibility of private or public organizations. A fifth step, from vertical to horizontal accountability, has also been mentioned in the literature. This step has less to do with the contents and more to do with the change of the character of relations in organizations. Moreover, this is not a shift which is typical for accountability. It reflects broader developments in society on the role of government. These developments also have consequences for accountability. In the context of the principles of good governance, it is in essence a reason why these principles have been strongly developed during the past years. This could give the impression that the starting point of the discussion of accountability is the traditional financial auditing. That is not correct, because accountability goes back a lot further than that and was always about substantive performance. Military commanders and other officials were accountable to their sovereigns for more than their expenditure of money.
2. The Concept of Accountability The literature focuses a lot on the concept of public accountability. Bovens is an author who paid much attention to this issue.7 Public accountability is a hallmark of modern democratic governance. Democracy remains a paper tiger if those in power cannot be held accountable in public for their acts and omissions, decisions, policies, and expenditures. In addition, it can increase the quality of the administration as part of the development towards good governance and, in doing so, it can prevent government errors.8
5
McCandless 2001.
6
Busuioc 2010.
7
Bovens 2007.
8
Ibid.
