Introducing Accountability

Accountability and governance go hand in hand. It is essential that we understand both concepts clearly and hold people accountable properly in order to have good governance in place. Effective audit practice shall always start with a thorough understanding of the context within which the client and other key stakeholders operate. This context involves both the governance and management process, and the accountability arrangements that bind them together.

Much has been discussed about accountability in the recent past. To an extent that a common man feels he has been fooled by the present government like previous government have been doing. National Accountability Bureau is just another eye-wash, another round of ‘much ado about nothing’. Is it just a lot more fuss something that is not important at all – for sure it is. It’s not just barking at the crow.

Understanding 

Accountability

Accountability is the obligation to render an account for a responsibility conferred. It implies responsibility and public trust. There is growing awareness and emphasis on everybody’s assuming responsibility and being accountable. It is just not that simple. Saying it, however, does not necessarily make it so. Many situations and circumstances demand that public officials and people in general be inspired by a sense of demonstrable responsibility, and yet it is the lack of accountability or its inadequacy that drives the current discourse on the subject. What characterizes the discussion is that beyond the utterance of the word, there is so often little explanation as to what is meant by it. The word accountability evokes, to some, a set of lofty ideals intuitively and eminently sensible. To others, it is a normal expectation from anyone entrusted with a responsibility. Still others see in the word an element of confrontation.

Sometimes monitoring is associated with accountability while the responsibility is discharged, as well as the notion of rewards and sanctions in the discharge of such responsibility. Often accountability is linked with failures or unfortunate outcomes especially when things go wrong. The person responsible usually refuses to take the blame and is often criticized for not being accountable. On the contrary, the person who takes credit for a good deed is not held responsible and accountable.

Accountability is generally considered to be a very positive democratic value; it has been viewed—in liberal societies, with a characteristic distrust of large concentrations of power—as an antidote, a countervailing power to the bureaucracy of governments and big business. And since the concept is used in a wide variety of organizations, the arrangements for achieving it vary depending on the circumstances.

The concept of accountability draws its meaning from a diverse body of literature in the areas of political science, religion, philosophy, sociology, management science, and public administration. Each of these disciplines has something important to say on the subject. What is said, however, often has a one-dimensional quality and is couched in the language of that discipline. Added together, an almost surrealistic picture of the subject of accountability emerges. Trying to apply simple logic to bring the pieces into focus often leads to oversimplification. In much of the management literature, accountability is assumed, relegated to the status of a technical, bureaucratic process, and then quickly dispatched in favour of other topics. Indeed, accountability does include process elements, but it also involves a wide range of values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours, which are important determinants of the nature and endurance of accountability arrangements.

Let us focus on the subject of accountability and related issues of governance and control. While it identifies the key elements of the literature, it also attempts to go deeper, explaining the varied interpretations those concepts are given and how they can be connected. For the practitioner to provide professional advice and products in the service of improving accountability, it is important to understand the subtleties, and sometimes the contradictions, associated with the subject and with the perspectives and strategies that governors, management and other stakeholders bring to bear in their respective accountability relationships.

Governance

Governance, is another term, in the context of accountability that has recently gained currency and importance. The word governance comes from the Greek word Kybernan, to direct the course of a ship, or to steer the ship. This word was borrowed by Romans as Gubernare and it eventually crossed the English Channel as Governor, a steerman or a pilot. In French, the rudder of a ship is called a gouvernail. In language of politics in the United States, occasionally it is referred to “steering the ship of state,” a metaphor for governance.

Governance now has the all-embracing concept of authority and control, of governing. Recently, the term is increasingly being used in the literature of management and public administration. Its crucial importance to effective public administration and prosperous private enterprises has recognized governance its current prominence as an issue. Its recognition has earned it greater emphasis in research institutes and existing organizations in order to have a better understanding of the concept and to review their governance practices.

Depending on the context, the word governance may be used to describe a variety of notions:

• the art of governing: the concepts and methods involved in governance, (for example, parliamentary or presidential, unitary or federated, military or civilian, authoritarian versus democratic, in the case of governments);

• the exercise of authority: the use of power, the process of governance;

• the structure of authority: the arrangement— hierarchical, bureaucratic—for governance to take place; and

• the jurisdiction: the area in which the governing body has authority.

Governance is under great stress both in public and corporate sector. Ineffective governance processes are barriers to an organization’s effective performance. An efficient and accountable management can ensure good performance only if those responsible for the direction of the organization can or will perform their duties appropriately.

 

–The writer is a  columnist.