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Understanding the interplay between transparency, accountability and e-procurement and their collective contribution to anti-corruption efforts in public procurement is crucial for developing effective strategies and policies. This research seeks to investigate whether e-procurement plays a significant role in enhancing transparency and accountability and subsequently reducing corruption risks in the public pharmaceutical procurement system.

The study employed a cross-sectional questionnaire survey to gather data from 274 procurement personnel and pharmacists working in 28 government-owned hospitals in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. The collected data were then analysed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the Hayes PROCESS macro to test the study hypotheses.

The study findings revealed a negative and significant relationship between transparency and procurement corruption (ß = −0.117, p < 0.008). Moreover, accountability negatively and significantly affects procurement corruption (ß = −0.162, p = 0.006). Furthermore, the findings indicate that, at a high degree of e-procurement system implementation, transparency and accountability have a stronger impact on procurement anti-corruption measures.

Policymakers and decision-makers should implement robust mechanisms that enhance transparency, accountability and anti-corruption efforts. These may include providing clear and accessible information on procurement processes, efficient mechanisms for monitoring and reporting procurement irregularities and continuous improvement of e-procurement systems. By incorporating these measures and nurturing collaboration amongst procurement stakeholders, it becomes possible to foster a procurement environment characterised by integrity, fairness, accountability and reduced corruption.

Whilst previous studies delved into exploring the effect of transparency and accountability on procurement anti-corruption, the novelty of this study is the inclusion of e-procurement as a moderating variable in the relationship between transparency, accountability and anti-corruption. By so doing, this study adds to the existing body of knowledge regarding anti-corruption measures and offers valuable practical insights for policymakers and professionals aiming to enhance transparency, accountability and ethical conduct within the public pharmaceutical procurement system.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a model that demonstrates how some organizational factors are linked to the proactive transparency behavior and outward accountability orientation of frontline public bureaucracies.

The model is developed on the basis of literature review.

It is shown in the model that some dimensions of organizational culture are linked to the “value for proactive transparency,” which, in turn, is linked to the “proactive transparency behavior” of frontline public bureaucracies. The proactive transparency behavior is also influenced by organizational structure and organizational endowment. Finally, the proactive transparency behavior determines “outward accountability” orientation.

This paper contributes to the understanding of the frontline public bureaucracy’s transparency behavior and outward accountability orientation from the perspective of organizational factors such as culture, structure, and endowment.

This study aims to examine the determinants of accountability and transparency of Indonesian village government(s), namely, the competence and organisational commitment of village government staff, and the consequences of accountability and transparency for village community trust.

This research was conducted in village governments in the province of the Special Region of Yogyakarta, covering four regencies: Sleman, Bantul, Kulon Progo and Gunung Kidul. A total of 128 village governments participated in this research. Data were collected by distributing a questionnaire survey, and a partial least squares technique was used to test the research hypotheses.

The study revealed that village government staff's competence and organisational commitment are positively associated with accountability. However, organisational commitment and accountability are not associated with transparency. In addition, it was discovered that transparency is positively associated with village community trust but accountability is not.

By testing the determinants and consequences of accountability and transparency following the ratification of the new village law regulating village government governance, this study is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, pioneering research.

The paper's purpose is to consider the challenges, a public sector organization faces combining both transparency and “intelligent” forms of accountability (cf. Roberts, 2009).

The authors conducted a case study of StatePol, a police service in an Australian state.

The data analysis revealed three themes. First, prior to 2013, transparency forms of accountability dominated, emphasizing crime statistics with the effect of reinforcing internal partitions and inhibiting collective action. Second, post-2013, a greater emphasis was placed on “intelligent” accountability with conversations around process and collective accountability at the operational level. Crime statistics were used less for operational-level accountability and more for attention-directing. Third, changing the emphasis from transparency to its combined use with “intelligent” accountability required strong leadership, clearly communicated strategy and middle-level managers with appropriate skills.

The authors identify a number of important factors in combining transparency and “intelligent” forms of accountability. The authors note the difficulties that fragmentation between forms of accountability and the somewhat amorphous nature of the accountability concept itself can cause. In doing so, the authors provide empirical evidence of the challenges changing from an emphasis on transparency, to combined use with an “intelligent” form of accountability.

After discussing recent academic attempts to assess the status of worldwide military transparency and accountability in nations which adopted open governance paradigms, this paper tries to show that such countries allegedly committed to democracy and open data should coherently fight for military transparency and citizen inclusion in the governance process, avoiding the prevalence of military secrecy over military transparency. The most important contribution of the paper is discussing the lack of military transparency, until now taken for granted as a traditional armed forces ’informal right, and proposing concrete definitions of military transparency and secrecy within the context of the open government partnership. In addition to the definitions, an exploratory model of how military accountability can affect military transparency has been suggested.

For the proposed endeavour, first a description on the context of open governance where the involved public defence sector is inserted is given. Second, notions of military transparency and secrecy are proposed. Finally, the paper discusses when military secrecy could be granted and what it means for military information to be unjustifiably kept secret. At the end, the urge of the citizen involvement to open the still insulated military governance systems is highlighted.

This paper proposes notions of military secrecy and military transparency and suggests the second term as a broader notion which includes the first. This paper also indirectly identifies the conditions for the inadmissibility of military secrecy and calls attention to the bad externalities of unjustifiably holding public information back.

The consideration of the proposed notions of military secrecy and military transparency could minimize the traditional excuse of military confidentiality that armed forces worldwide tend to not to convey public information to the public while making military accountability perfectly possible without overexposing its strategies regarding national defence.

Providing armed forces and citizens with concrete definitions of military secrecy and military transparency could not only help military institutions to develop a sincere transparency policy based on open government terms, but it could also guide interested media and citizens with their control and oversight tasks by establishing clear limits for alleged secrecy while releasing the borders for military transparency.

The suggested approach for military transparency and secrecy is not only adequate to the globalized strategy of open governance but also mainly a way to finally reward citizens’ often misused and manipulated trust.

It is the first attempt of an academic definition for military secrecy and military transparency taking into consideration the open government terms and aiming at improving military accountability.

This study explores how introducing a permissioned blockchain in a supply chain context impacts accountability relationships and the process of rendering an account. The authors explore how implementing a digital transformation impacts the governance of network transactions.

The authors mobilize 28 interviews and documentary analysis. The authors focus on early blockchain adopters to get an insight into how implementing a permissioned blockchain can transform information sharing, coordination and collaboration between business partners, now converted into network participants.

The authors suggest that implementing a permissioned blockchain impacts accountability across three levers, namely through the ledger, through the code and through the people, where these levers are interconnected. Blockchains are often valued for their ability to enable transparency through the visibility of transactions, but the authors argue that this is an incomplete view. Rather, transparency alone does not help to satisfy a duty of accountability, as it can result in selective disclosure or obfuscation.

The authors extend the conceptualizations of accountability in the blockchain literature by focusing on how accountability relationships are enacted, and accounts are rendered in a permissioned blockchain context. Additionally, the authors complement existing work on accountability and governance by suggesting an integrated model across three dimensions: ledger, code and people.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the accounting and governance of public private partnerships (PPPs) that are structured as joint venture partnerships. Drawing on Giddens’ structuration theory, the paper examines how human agents interact with these joint venture structures and analyses the effects on financial disclosures and public accountability for taxpayers’ investments.

The authors adopt a cross-case analysis to investigate two such PPP schemes, which form part of the UK’s programme of investment in primary healthcare, known as the Local Improvement Finance Trust (LIFT) policy. The authors employ a combination of interviews and analysis of financial statements and publicly available official documents.

The corporate structure of these LIFT schemes is very complicated so that the financial accounting is opaque. The implication is that the joint venture mechanism cannot be relied upon to deliver transparency of reporting. The paper argues that the LIFT structures are deliberately constructed by human agents to act as barriers to transparency about public expenditure.

The financial reporting undermines public accountability and transparency as both are necessarily restricted. Policy makers should pay attention to not only the private sector technologies but also the manner in which structures are used to reduce transparency and consequently undermine public accountability.

The paper provides detailed analysis from the perspective of structuration theory to show how human agents use structures to impact on financial reporting and public accountability.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether Shell Nigeria’s Global Memorandum of Understanding (GMoU) promotes corporate-community accountability as a basis for fostering sustainable community development in the Niger Delta.

Shell Nigeria’s GMoU stand-alone reports were analysed through the lenses of accountability and transparency theoretical frameworks to explore the extent to which GMoU, as a corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative, is dialogically embedded and practised. Meaning-oriented content analysis was deductively used to isolate pertinent themes and generate findings from the background theoretical literature.

The authors find that Shell discursively appropriates the meaning of accountability and transparency in a manner that allows it to maintain its social legitimacy and the asymmetric power relations between itself and host communities whilst restricting communities’ agency to hold it accountable. Shell does this by interpreting the notion of participation restrictively, selectively deploying the concept of transparency and accountability and subtly exerting excessive control over the GMoU. Thus, the GMoU’s potential to contribute to sustainable community development and positive corporate-community relation is unlikely tenable.

Accountability and transparency are core and critical to corporate-community relations and for achieving community development CSR objectives, but are often taken for granted or ignored in the CSR literature on the Niger Delta of Nigeria. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by using accountability and transparency lenses to unpick GMoU model and contribute to studies on CSR practices by oil multinational corporations (MNCs) in developing countries. Indeed, the use of these lenses to explore CSR process offers new insights as to why CSR practices have failed to contribute to sustainable community development despite increased community spending by oil MNCs.

The purpose of the study is to reviewing community empowerment in ecological conservation through the Coral Reef Rehabilitation and Management Program (COREMAP). This research is under a governance perspective, namely transparency, accountability and community participation in Bahari Village, South Buton District, Indonesia.

Data were collected in three ways: they are interviews, observation and documentation. Data were analyzed using qualitative descriptive methods.

The empowerment of coastal village communities through the COREMAP program is not fully managed properly referring to the principles of transparency, accountability and participatory. In addition, the role of stakeholders is not maximal, where the government and the companion are not able to provide solutions to the problem of community empowerment while the apathetic community in the implementation of empowerment program. So that empowerment does not fully have a positive impact on coastal communities. While the sustainability of the empowerment program is threatened with failure, which has an impact on COREMAP's environmental damage and coastal communities.

The originality of this research is that the study was conducted on coastal communities in ecological conservation through the COREMAP program in Bahari Village, South Buton Regency.

The purpose of this study is to examine how accountability is constructed for blockchain systems. With the aim of increasing knowledge on accountability across three different types of blockchains (public, private and consortium), the researchers ask: how do blockchain systems construct accountability?

This study draws on theorising in the accountability literature to study how blockchains relate to our construction and understanding of accountability. A qualitative field study of the Australian blockchain technology landscape is conducted, with insights garnered from 18 blockchain experts.

Findings reveal that different types of blockchains employ different forms and mechanisms of accountability and in novel ways previously less acknowledged in the literature. Importantly, this study finds that accountability does not require a principal–agent relation and can still manifest in less pure applications of blockchain technology across a wide range of stakeholders, contrary to that espoused in earlier exhortations of blockchain use in interdisciplinary literature. This study also finds that similar subtypes of accountability operate very differently across public, private and consortium blockchains and there exists an inverse relation between trust and consensus building through transparency as blockchains progress from public to private types. Overall, this study offers novel explanations for the relevance of greater accountability in blockchains, especially when the assumptions of public blockchains are softened and applied as private and consortium blockchains.

This study contributes to the accountability literature by addressing how different blockchain systems reshape the understanding of traditional accounting and accountability practices. This study questions the very need for a principal–agent relation to facilitate accountability and offers an additional perspective to how trust and transparency operate as key mechanisms of accountability.