Accountability in Public Administration

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Introduction

Public accountability is one of the noble concepts immensely supported by scholars in the discipline of public administration. In the political discourses coupled with policy documents, the term finds an imperative usage since it portrays an image of trustworthiness and transparency (Forrer, et al., 2010).

These two aspects are crucial since citizens who are also the clients of a state become satisfied that a system of administration is able to meet their anticipations in the public sector without exposing their resources to risks of fraud. In this extent, accountability emerges as one of the key values in the public administration. The aim of this study is to discuss the issues involved in making public organizations accountable.

A consideration is also given to discuss the people whom public officials are accountable to, and the most effective means of ensuring a balance between the demands for accountability and the need to have high-performing organizations.

Issues involved in making Public Organizations Accountable

Accountability involves making organizations transparent and responsible in their dealing in the effort to enhance their trustworthiness. For them to realize the goal, they need to address a number of issues concerning accountability. One of such issue is the development of the capacity to deal with emerging matters that may impede their efforts to attain their dream of being accountable.

For instance, the advent of globalization presents many challenges to corporations and institutions of public administration, seeking that to be accountable in many nations. Kearns (2003) supports the argument by further adding, “Globalization plays the role of shaping the current trends in the global economic markets and the increasing interactions among nations and people from different parts of the world” (p.76).

Emergence of new interactions driven by the dawn of globalization introduces challenges to institutions of public administration in that they handle emerging new roles and expand their functionality sphere. The more expansive an institution or any system requiring checks is, the harder it becomes to handle all the individual facets of an organization, which may provide loopholes for acts of fraud.

Emerging new issues such as those prompted by globalization also present challenges to accountability efforts of an organization due to “the need to understand the dynamics of global value chains, creating trade facilitation structures, developing partnerships, and the establishment of value chains and networks” (Kearns, 2003, p.81).

Existence of such new challenges means that public administration officials have to constantly change their tactics for enhancing accountability since traditional approaches or styles for public administration cease to be effective in handling all the contemporary situations that may prove to be a challenge to the efforts of becoming accountable.

From the above discussion, it is essential that an organization that seeks to be accountable in a globalized market to consider looking for new approaches of enhancing transparency as opposed to the traditional approaches for enhancing intelligibility in the public administration. In fact, this factor is yet another crucial issue involved in making public organizations accountable.

The history of public administration reveals that the main approach for enhancing accountability is through exercising of control and close monitoring of persons who are mandated to execute certain affairs that are of public interest. This task entails “bureaucratic discretion through compliance with some tightly drawn rules and regulations” (Forrer et al., 2010, p.477).

Alteration of such an approach is critical in the modern world that is driven by hefty interactions so that, rather than using a direct-control paradigm, an organization has to consider implementation of strategies for enhancing accountability. The strategy must be driven by the concerns of delegations as a methodology for breaking down the bureaucratic approaches to public accountability.

The relevance of this issue for an organization that wants to be accountable rests on the platform that, although delegation is an effective way for enhancing accountability, it has its limitations. A challenge facing an organization that is determined to be accountable is the establishing of balance and determination of the extents and permissible thresholds of accountability in the organization.

Thirdly, an organization needs to deal proactively with the issue of balancing levels of accountability anticipated from various stakeholders. In support of this argument, Forrer et al. (2010) reckon, “public managers report not only to a multitude of elected officials, but also to a plethora of interest groups, clientele, media, and other actors” (p.478).

This argument means that public administrators serve many conflicting interests of different stakeholders, both formal and informal, through the deployment of appropriate mechanisms for enhancing accountability.

The balancing mechanism that an organization that seeks to become accountable must deploy includes hierarchical accountability, public accountability, while not negating deploying of mechanisms for enhancing accountability to impersonal standards.

Organizations that embrace the relevance of accountability as a way of development of trust among various stakeholders must appreciate that one of the important issues they must put into perspective is that they must conform precisely to a myriad of legitimized but also competing anticipations for accountability.

To whom are Public Officials Accountable?

Public officials have to be accountable to various people. Essentially, accountability is a “means through which public agencies and their workers answer to the citizens directly and indirectly for the use of their power, authority, and resources” (Kearns, 2003, p.9).

From this definition, it is paramount to note that, in the first degree, public officials are accountable to the citizens who are also served by other persons and interest groups to whom public officials must also be accountable. Such other persons include city councils, administrators such as presidents, states’ legislatures, media, and professional associations, among others.

With the rise of and advocating for governance approaches that portray the exercise of democracy as the chief mechanism of ensuring equal presentations of all citizens’ concerns and interests in the tools of administration, concerns have been alarming on the mechanisms that can ensure that governments are held accountable effectively.

Consequently, with regard to Kearns (2003), internal means of enhancing accountability, including “official rules, codes of conduct, administrative hierarchy, performance evaluation, organizational culture, and professional ethics” (p.65) have dominated the discussions of public accountability. Some of these mechanisms of enhancing accountability have been pinned in the constitutions of many democratic nations.

All systems of power comprise executives, judicial, and legislative divisions of government. These divisions have the responsibility to keep public administrators on the check to limit their discretion to ensure they are achieving their noble mandates placed on them by citizens.

For instance, in the US the progressive era marked the establishments of “independent government regulatory agencies, public commissions, and corporation to oversee government bodies through the executive branch” (Forrer et al., 2010, p.478).

From the context of the roles of congress, public officials have a duty to ensure that they meet the requirements placed on them in terms of meeting the demands for accountability as stipulated by organizations for agency oversight and committees for budget appropriations, among others.

Since citizens cannot directly regulate the operations of public officials, such organs exercise control and monitoring of the activities of public officials on behalf of the citizens to ensure that they are accountable to any repercussions of the policies formulated and implemented by the public officials.

Public officials are accountable to legislatures. Legislatures have roles to play to investigate the operations of various public officials and demand to provisions of information on certain aspects that they may believe have comprised the national ethics and codes of practice in public offices, including accountability. Organizations such as GAO can also be employed by legislatures and congress to scrutinize public agency programs.

Consequently, public officials must be accountable to them. Since the goal of accountability is to ensure transparency to all interest groups and stakeholders in the operations of public administrators as argued before, public officials are also accountable to media, professional communities, and client groups.

Client groups are interested in the implications of public policies. Such groups have specific anticipated outcomes from public officials. Should the public officials fail to meet these anticipations effectively or do things at exorbitant and inflated costs, the officials have to be held accountable for the failure or embezzlements of funds.

Conclusion: Balancing the Demands for Accountability and the Need to have High-performing Organizations

Accountability implies that public officials have to evaluate every policy or decision they take to ensure that it does not expose the interest of various stakeholders and interest groups at risk upon its implementation. This argument means that decisions and policies that have high potentials of yielding optimal results but possessing high-risk vulnerabilities may not be implemented.

Measuring performance from the paradigm of the magnitude of returns, for instance, in terms of social benefit, failure to implement projects having high risks of failure, but having high levels of returns means that the performance of a public institution is impaired.

Public officials must balance demand for accountability and the need to have high-performing organizations.

For instance, considering the experience of hurricane Katrina, it is arguable that the government ought to have invested heftily on strategies and equipment for dealing with aftermaths and or for detection of both the likelihoods and the magnitudes of natural catastrophes in the bid to enhance effective disaster awareness through its established institutions for disaster management.

Such a measure would make disaster management institutions highly performing if the investments turn out commensurate to the anticipated levels of response to human and logistical challenges posed by hurricane Katrina.

However, in the effort to ensure that such organizations become highly performing, the question that emerges is whether indeed public officials charged with running such institutions would be willing to venture into risky decisions that would compromise their levels of accountability in the public domain.

Koliba, Zia, and Mills (2011) support this line of thought by noting that it is important to develop both theoretical and empirical constructs “to identify and assess how and whether failures of accountability lead to failures in performance” (p.210).

Directly congruent with this proposal, it is of paramount importance that public officials be made to account for success rather than just failures. Such a strategy can help to balance demands for accountability and the need for high performing organizations.

Obtaining a balance between accountability and the need for high-performing organizations is a challenge that public officials need to proactively address, especially bearing in mind that the citizens whom they owe the ultimate responsibility while making their decisions do not directly elect them.

Consequently, public officials may consider complying with political accountability roles since, according to Bovens (1998), “public officials are not rigidly constrained in their performance by narrow legal or procedural settings” (p.31).

This case means that the capacity to form and operate public institutions driven by the motive for high performance may be compromised by the need to meet programmed guidelines issued by the appointing authority in hierarchical systems of administration.

This argument is more imperative upon considering Bovens’ (1998) assertion that political accountability “tends to use outcomes as the main parameter for evaluation of performance rather than compliance with administrative rules and procedures” (p.31).

As a repercussion, it is probable that public officials may fail to balance accountability with the need to create highly performing public institutions due to the need to satisfy the anticipations of the elected authority as opposed to direct anticipations of the electorate.

Although in democratic and corruption-free nations, the elected persons may present the interest of the electorate. Hence, the anticipations of the elected and the appointing authority from the public officials have to measure up to the anticipation of the electorate. In the corruption-prone nations, the electorate interests are not presented by the elected persons.

If public administrators appointed by the corrupt-elected persons have to be politically accountable, it means that a balance between accountability and the need to put in place a highly performing organization cannot be established.

Reference List

Bovens, M. (1998). The Quest for Responsibility: Accountability and Citizenship in Complex Organizations. Public Administration, 77(3), 455-474.

Forrer, J., Kee, J., Newcomer, K., & Boyer, E. (2010). Public- Private Partnerships and the public accountability question. Public administration review, 1(1), 475- 484.

Kearns, P. (2003). Accountability in a Seamless Economy, in G. Peters and J. Pierre (eds.), Handbook of Public Administration. London: Sage Publications.

Koliba, C., & Zia, A., & Mills, R. (2011). Accountability in governance networks: an assessment of public, private and nonprofit emergency management practices following hurricane Katrina. Public Administration Review, 1(1), 210-20.

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