2. The Concept 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.

Historically, the concept of accountability is closely related to financial accounting. In fact, it literally comes from bookkeeping. In modern times, accountability has moved far beyond its bookkeeping origins and has become a symbol for good governance, both in the public and in the private sector. Here we have to realize that the legal contexts in the public and the private sectors are different and, for that reason, it is better to use different terminology for the principles of corporate governance in the private sector and the principles of good governance in the public sector. The corresponding principles of accountability also need an apt interpretation to both concepts. The aims of both sectors are considerably different. The public sector serves the general interest, while the private sector is concerned with maximizing profit. The actors involved in the accountability process also differ, as citizens are stakeholders in the public sector while a private corporation is mainly concerned with shareholders and a somewhat more limited scope of stakeholders.

(a) A broad concept of accountability In contemporary political and scholarly discourse, ‘accountability’9 often serves as a conceptual umbrella term that covers various other distinct concepts, such as transparency, equity, democracy, efficiency, responsiveness, responsibility, and integrity.10 Particularly in American scholarly and political discourse, ‘accountability’ is often used interchangeably with ‘good governance’ or virtuous behaviour. For many states, the term ‘accountability’ is used to refer to ‘best practices’. However, in the United States, the Government Accountability Office deals mostly with auditing spending and not regulation of good governance as a whole.

Such quite broad conceptualizations of the concept have made it difficult to establish empirically whether an official or organization is subject to accountability. The reason is that each of the various elements needs extensive operationalization itself. Another reason is that the various elements cannot be measured along the same scale. Some dimensions, such as transparency, are instrumental for accountability but not constitutive to accountability. Others, such as responsiveness, have more evaluative rather than analytical dimensions. Accountability in this very broad sense is basically an evaluative and not an analytical concept. It is used to qualify positively a state of affairs or the performance of an actor. It comes close to ‘responsiveness’ and ‘a sense of responsibility’, a willingness to act in a transparent, fair, and equitable way. Accountability in this broad sense is an essentially contested and contestable concept because there is no general consensus about the standards for accountable behaviour and because these are so dependent on circumstances of time, place, and the like.11

(b) A narrow concept of accountability Bovens has not defined the concept in such a broad, evaluative sense, but in a narrower, somewhat sociological sense.12 ‘Accountability’ is then not just another political catchword but also refers to concrete practices of being accountable. The most concise description of accountability would be ‘the obligation to explain and justify conduct’. This implies a relationship between an actor, the accounter, and a forum, the accountholder or accountee.13 Bovens has therefore stayed close to its etymological and

9 Ibid. 10 Mulgan 2000, 555; Behn 2001, 3–6. 11 Fisher 2004. 12 Bovens 2007, 452. 13 Pollitt 2003, 89.