Search results

The purpose of this paper is to deepen and advance the understanding of the construction of accountability within the relationship between government funders and development non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

The paper presents a case study examining the process through which an influential Dutch development NGO, Oxfam Novib, constructed its own accountability while simultaneously seeking to influence shifts in government funder accountability requirements. It enrols a combination of comprehensive archival data on the Dutch government’s financing scheme for NGOs from 1965 to 2012 and in-depth interviews with Oxfam Novib managers and Dutch government officials. The co-evolution in accountability within Oxfam Novib and the government funding scheme is conceptualised using the notions of imposed, felt and adaptive accountability

The case unveils the dynamics through which accountability within a major government funding scheme for NGOs was co-constructed by Oxfam Novib and the Dutch government’s development aid department. In particular, it reveals how this process was influenced by an internal evolution in Oxfam Novib’s organisational approach to accountability and an institutional context characterised by consensus-based economic and social policy making. The case also unveils the process through which Oxfam Novib’s influence declined as more demanding, narrowly focused government accountability requirements emerged in a setting that was increasingly critical of NGOs.

The paper presents a rare example of a context where development NGOs have proactively sought and secured influence over the accountability demands of a key donor. It is unique in combining consideration of the internal evolution of accountability within an individual NGO (conceptualised as an evolution from felt to adaptive accountability) with a progression in the form of accountability required by governmental funders. The paper unveils the conditions under which NGO-preferred conceptions of accountability may gain (and lose) influence among key funders.

This paper aims to explore the development of the accountability ideals and practices of Quaker industrialists during the period 1840–1914.

The research employs a case study approach and draws on the extensive archives of Quaker industrialists in the Richardson family networks, British Parliamentary Papers and the Religious Society of Friends together with relevant contemporary and current literature.

Friends shed their position as Enemies of the State and obtained status and accountabilities undifferentiated from those of non-Quakers. The reciprocal influences of an increasingly complex business environment and radical changes in religious beliefs and practices combined to shift accountabilities from the Quaker Meeting House to newly established legal accountability mechanisms. Static Quaker organisation structures and accountability processes were ineffective in a rapidly changing world. Decision-making was susceptible to the domination of the large Richardson family networks in the Newcastle Meeting House. This research found no evidence of Quaker corporate social accountability through action in the Richardson family networks and it questions the validity of this concept. The motivations underlying Quakers’ personal philanthropy and social activism were multiple and complex, extending far beyond accountabilities driven by religious belief.

This research has originality and value as a study of continuity and change in Quaker accountability regimes during a period that encompassed fundamental changes in Quakerism and its orthopraxy, and their business, social and political environments.

Focusing on Sanitarium, a commercial‐charity operating as a department of a church, the paper aims to use Mashaw's taxonomy to examine this organisation's informal reporting in the context of accountability.

The paper adopts a case study approach and draws on data gathered from primary and secondary archival sources, interviews with key informants, and reports in the public media.

The paper examines Sanitarium, a hybrid organisation that has made informal account giving its primary means of reporting to constituents and the general public. It reveals that while the informal reporting blurs the boundaries of reporting regimes, the informal account always discloses something more, has the spirit of accountability and provides insight into the organisation that otherwise would not be accessible. The paper shows the usefulness of applying Mashaw's framework to examine the accountability practices of organisations in the third sector.

The paper extends understanding into the nature of accountability by highlighting the contribution of informal account giving, the role of stakeholder perceptions in determining what counts as accountability, and the benefits of using a framework that can be applied to all commercial organisations, including faith organisations. The paper focuses on an area of study that has been acknowledged as under‐researched and contributes to the knowledge of accountability in religious organisations.

The paper aims to document the effects of the privatisation of building code enforcement regimes. It notes that privatisation is generally accompanied by trade‐offs between competing democratic values such as effectiveness, efficiency, accountability, and equity and explores the extent to which particular trade‐offs might be related to aspects of the design of the regimes in which they occur.

The paper uses a comparative case study analysis of two Australian and two Canadian privatised building control regimes. This comparison is based on semi‐structured interviews with key actors in the building and building control industries.

Evidence of the expected trade‐offs between competing democratic values is found in the privatised regimes within the case study. Some of these might be explained in terms of the extent of private sector involvement (PSI) in a regime, or of the nature of the relationship between the public and the private sectors within it. However, not all trade‐offs are necessarily related to these characteristics. Overall, PSI deliver an increase in effectiveness and efficiency but at a particular cost of public accountability. A competitive, rather than a complementary, relationship between the private and public sectors in a privatised regime is also found to be more likely to generate problems related to the equity of the service being provided.

The case studies are explorative in nature and the research does not therefore claim empirical generalization, but instead provides illustrations of the impacts that might result from privatising building code enforcement. The paper is largely based on a series of interviews. The findings should be understood as the aggregated opinions of the interviewees.

Based on the case study analysis, the paper draws important conclusions for policymakers in this area. It suggests that privatisation should be performed with the utmost care and highlights positive features of the regimes studied that might indicate some of the ingredients of a successful privatisation. These include providing private sector inspectors with the opportunity to specialize, confining PSI to assessment tasks, and ensuring that a complementary relationship exists between the private and public sectors within the privatised regime.

The paper makes original contributes to existing literature on the impact of the “policy mix” on regulatory governance, and on the trade‐offs which result from the introduction of the private sector into regulatory governance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the disruption to civic accountability by strategic corporate action in the form of SLAPP suits.

This paper provides empirical evidence of the discursive processes underpinning participatory and emancipatory accountability regimes through the lens of deliberative democracy and the Habermasian ideal of the public sphere.

Within this paper, it is argued that the strategic use of SLAPPs by corporations presents a danger to both mechanistic and virtuous forms of accountability regardless of what deliberative democratic theory is adopted. Habermas’ theory of communicative action and notion of the “public sphere” is utilised to demonstrate how SLAPPs can result in the colonisation of public discursive arenas to prevent others providing alternative (in form) and counter (in view) accounts of corporate behaviour and thus act to limit opportunities for corporate accountability.

This paper throws light on a practice being utilised by corporations to limit public participation in democratic and participatory accountability processes. Strategic use of SLAPPs limit the “ability” for citizens to provide an alternative “account” of corporate behaviour.

This paper is original in that it analyses the impact on accountability of strategic corporate practice of issuing SLAPP suits to “chill” public political discussion and limit protest about issues of social and civic importance. The paper extends the critical accounting literature into improving dialogic and participatory accountability regimes.

This paper attempts to replace the understanding of public sector accountability as a linear and hierarchical process with one in which accountability occurs within a network of social relationships. It associates the former approach with the introduction of New Public Management principles in Australian public administration. It investigates the effect of this on the ability of Australia's indigenous people both to access democratic accountability as citizens, and to develop their community organisations as service providers.

The paper is based on field experience with aboriginal community organisations and critical assessment of the literature on this aspect of Australian public administration.

The paper finds that New Public Management approaches in Australian public administration have not led to greater political accountability but the reverse. As a disadvantaged, culturally distinct minority, aboriginal people are the subject of, rather than partners in, accountability regimes which mire their community service organisations in reporting requirements at the expense of practical activity. In some respects Aborigines are dealt with as individual citizen/clients, at other times as a disadvantaged minority group, and third, as culturally distinct polities. Each of these approaches implies different forms of accountability both by Aborigines to the state and by the state to them.

This analysis is inherently interpretative rather than exclusively empirical. However, greater efficiency as well as culturally appropriate outcomes can be found by instituting regional regimes of reciprocal accountability.

The analysis of developments in public administration is rarely brought to bear on Australian indigenous affairs.

There are different narratives surrounding smart mobility, which can sometimes even appear as opposing (Lyons, 2018). Its fiercest proponents are promising versions of a revolutionised future, where users have on-demand access to multiple mobility options and are freed from car ownership, while transport systems become carbon neutral and congestion is a problem of a bygone age (Sherman, 2019). At the same time, the plausibility of such visions of the future has been questioned, with critics warning against the potentially negative impacts of the widespread adoption of privately provided services and stressing the need for state intervention to avoid exacerbating ‘classic’ transport issues such as congestion and unequal access to services, as well as creating new challenges such as uncontrolled market monopolies (Docherty, Marsden, & Anable, 2018). Drawing from these narratives, this chapter explores how officials from English transport authorities see state intervention evolve in the future, and what accountability arrangements are necessary to achieve the level of steering they envisage. Based on interviews with local authority officials, this chapter shows that the officials’ views generally align more closely with the narrative of providers than with that of critics. Although different local authorities envisage varying levels of control and steering of smart mobility, they all expect new services to improve the local transport provision. This chapter also discusses the barriers local authorities face in shaping local accountability arrangements.

This study offers a critical inquiry into accountability vis-à-vis organizational identity formation. It investigates how accountability evolves in the transformation of an NGO operating in the field of migration management from an informal grassroots group into a fully-fledged organization.

The paper is the outcome of a participatory action research project on Welcome Refugees (WR), a UK-based NGO. The project involved documentary analysis, focus group and semi-structured interviews, field notes, and participant observation. The analysis draws from poststructuralist theorization to explain the interplay between organizational identity and different forms of NGO accountability over time.

The study shows how different forms of accountability became salient over time and were experienced differently by organizational members, thus leading to competing collective identity narratives. Organizational members felt accountable to beneficiaries in different ways, and this was reflected in their identification with the organization. Some advocated a rights-based approach that partially resonated with the accountability demands of external donors, while others aimed at enacting their feelings of accountability by preserving their closeness with beneficiaries and using a need-based approach. These differences led to an identity struggle that was ultimately solved through the silencing of marginalized narratives and the adoption of an adaptive regime of accountability.

The findings of the case are of practical relevance to quasi-organizations that struggle to form and maintain organizational identity in their first years of operation. Their survival depends not only on their ability to accommodate and/or resist a multiplicity of accountability demands but also on their ability to develop a shared and common understanding of identity accountability.

The paper problematizes rather than takes for granted the process through which organizations acquire a viable identity and the role of accountability within them.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the scholarship on public management models and to advance the theoretical conceptualization of the complexity of performance management systems (PMSs). The paper explores how the characteristics of PMSs vary within and across different organizational units in common institutional context, based on the case of a regional authority in Italy.

A framework of analysis considering both objective and subjective factors was derived from a combination of performance typologies in the public sector, namely ideal types of managing performance (Bouckaert and Halligan, 2007) and performance regimes (Jakobsen et al., 2017). The combination of the characteristics of these two models across different Directorates General (DGs) has also been explored through a nested case study (Starman, 2013). Data were gathered via a desk analysis of official documents regarding the planning and programming of a regional authority along with in-depth interviews with top-level managers.

The results highlighted a clear differentiation of PMSs, both within and across DGs. The findings of the study reveal the hybrid nature of PMSs within a common institutional context.

Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Bouckaert and Halligan (2007) and Jakobsen et al. (2017), the paper provides an integrated approach for analysing PMSs, considering both objective and subjective dimensions. Insights and indications for future research on hybridity at a meso level of public organizations are highlighted.

Following radical restructuring of the electricity industry in New Zealand since 1987, the government adopted a “light‐handed” regulatory regime that used market‐based methods involving competition and transparent accountability. This accountability is in part discharged through the provision of information in the corporate annual report. To assess the quality of that communication, a disclosure index was developed and applied to the annual reports of the 33 electricity retail and distribution companies which comprise the entire industry in New Zealand. The index was developed using the ideas and opinions of 15 experts representing broad stakeholder groups. This paper compares the resulting scores for the extent and quality of each index item with the level of importance of those items as stated by the panel. Many items are not adequately disclosed, resulting in an information gap between stakeholders’ expectations and the disclosures provided by the electricity companies. This paper identifies the items and the detail about them needed to close that gap.