What is Public Accountability?

Accountability Matters!

John Samuel

Accountability denotes the rights, responsibilities and duties that exist between people and various institutions that affect their lives. Accountability and legitimacy are two sides of the same coin. Lack of accountability will result in lack of political legitimacy. Lack of legitimacy will result in democratic deficit and the consequent abuse of power by decision makers and power-holders.

Democratic Accountability is both political and ethical. Accountability also denotes legal, social, economic and managerial aspects. Accountability is about answerability and enforceability. Answerability means the right to get information and clear response from any institutions or authority and the obligation of such institutions to provide information and response to such stake-holders. Enforceability denotes the capacity to ensure that a redressal is done or action is taken to correct a wrong action, wrong policy. Empowerment of people in terms of information, knowledge and mobilization is a prerequisite to demand any form of effective accountability.




From the perspective of democratic governance, people and citizens are the owners and the shapers of the State. The sovereignty of the Sate is derived from the sovereignty of the citizenship. Hence, all institutions of the state and governments are duty bound to be accountable to citizens. However, power is no longer the monopoly of the state or governments. Increasingly big transnational corporations, media, various public and private institutions, political parties, civil society formations and NGOs wield power and control resources and take actions and decision that affect the lives, choices and livelihood of people. Hence there has to be broader understanding, politics and ethics of accountability.

The big players in the markets like transnational corporations, big financial operators, including the banks and big media corporation increasingly tend to shape the boundaries of the state and lives and choices of the people. These unaccountable and powerful actors can become the biggest threat to Just and Democratic Governance in their quest for profit, unbridled free market, and accumulation of wealth and information.


Hence the notion of public accountability should ensure accountability of the state, governments and its institutions, corporate accountability, media accountability, accountability of the political parties and that of NGOs. All institutions and organisations that operate in the public sphere and market place need to be necessarily accountable to people, citizens and all stake holders.

One of the preconditions for Accountability is the Right to Information and political space and institutional mechanism to seek effective accountability from the various governmental, corporate, public and non-governmental institutions. Transparency, Accountability and legitimacy are interdependent conditions for any just and democratic form of governance. The exercise of any form of power or authority requires provisions for accountability to ensure that power or authority is not abused or used for self-interest of the few powerful. In many ways Autonomy and accountability are very much linked. More the autonomy, more the need for accountability.


It has been rightly pointed out by Held- Mathias that: “ Accountability refers to the fact that decision makers do not enjoy unlimited authority or autonomy but have to justify their action vis-a-visa affected parties or stake holders. These stake holders must be able to evaluate the actions of decision makers and to sanction them if their performance is poor or even removing from their positions of authority”

There are many innovative forms of seeking Accountability. The process of budget tracking, social audit, citizens’ tribunals, public hearings, people’s commission, and the monitoring of institutions of governance and public policies by citizens grouped proved to be effective means towards strengthening accountability.

There are multiple approaches to accountability. A typology of Accountability will help us to develop clear approaches and strategies to seek accountability in various arenas of power.

Political accountability
i) Consists of Checks and balances within the state including over delegated individuals in public offices responsible for carrying out specific tasks on behalf of people or citizens.
ii) The state provides an account of its actions, and consults citizens and stake holders prior to taking action in order to enforce rights and responsibilities.
iii) Mechanisms of political accountability can be both horizontal and vertical. The state can have its own horizontal mechanisms like, such as ombudsman, parliamentary audit committee, autonomous office of the Comptroller and Auditor General. Citizens and Civil Society uses elections, court cases, public interest litigation or political mobilizations.
iv) Legal provisions and effective mechanism for Right to Information as well as information disclosure.
v) Regular and predictable space for citizen’s and people’s participating in the formulation and monitoring of budget.
vi) A new accountability framework for the Political Parties (as they hold enormous power in a democratic polity) to disclose their sources of income, expenditure and provisions to regulate corporate donations for political parties.

Social Accountability:

i) Focuses on people’s actions or civil society initiatives to hold state and its institutions of government to account for using social mobilization, people-centred advocacy, investigative reports, media advocacy, public hearings, social audits, reports card, and citizens’ tribunals.
ii) Addresses such issues such as human rights violations, security of people, judicial autonomy, and access to justice, electoral frauds and corruptions at various levels.
iii) Seeks to expand social and political spaces to seek accountability from Corporate Houses, Media and other powerful actors.
iv) Demands accountability from powerful financial institutions, including all International Financial Institutions such as World Bank, to be accountable, transparent and responsive to the communities where their projects are implemented and to people at large.
v) Seeks to strengthen the accountability mechanism and transparency measures of civil society organisations, NGOs and all such institutions in the public space.

Ethical Accountability

i) Stresses accountability to a certain systems of values within democratic principles as well as values of Justice, equity and Freedom. Ethical accountability has both personal and institutional dimension and scope beyond the conventional territories of the nation-state.
ii) This also means Powerful countries are not only accountable to the people or ‘demos’ of their respective country. They are also accountable to the people of countries affected by the actions of such governments. In this way, the United States should be ethically and socially accountable to the people of Iraq, and Afghanistan who are at the receiving end of military aggressions and conflicts perpetuated for the sake of maintaining the global military hegemony.
iii) It also focuses on seeking accountability of Business Corporation who seeks to monopolize agriculture and food products and those who are in the business of making various kinds of medicine and drugs and research in biotechnology or patenting of life forms. This has deep moral implications beyond one country or people. Hence ethical limits to market monopoly and efforts to regulate such corporations and make them accountable to this and coming generations can be a part of ethical accountability.
iv) Inter-generational accountability in terms of environment and climate change. This includes personal accountability to values of sustainable consumptions, less carbon emissions and accountability to peoples and generations who will be affected by our own individual and societal action, consumptions and behaviors.
v) Includes ethical accountability in terms of attitude, behavior and language to ensure dignity and respect for women, ethnic, religious or racial minorities and resisting all forms of discrimination based on gender, race, language, cast or ethnicity.

Managerial Accountability;

i) Focuses on financial accounting and reporting, system accountability within state institutions, judged according to agreed performance criteria
ii) Regular Auditing , appraisals and systems to ensure internal management integrity and effective and efficient use of financial and management resources
iii) New forms of accountability such as environmental and social audits
iv) Disclosure of the sources of income, expenditure and management principle in a predictable and systematic manner. Managerial accountabilities are often upward accountability. However, increasingly notions of horizontal accountability and downward accountability are recognized.


As accountability is a function of power relations, it is important to identify and expand the spaces and processes of power in each context. This requires legal provisions, constitutional guarantees, social mobilization, information and knowledge as well as the innovative use of media, technology, internet as well as social and policy research. As the power in the international arena and global space are increasing appropriated by the big transnational corporations, operators in the international finance market, and International Finance Institutions (IFI), there is a real challenge to seek accountability and transparency from these organisations.

Weighed voting at the World Bank and IMF means greater control and power by few rich countries in the global north. Though the World Bank and IMF claim that they are accountable to their stake holders and they are relatively better transparent in terms of information disclosure and they have Inspectional Panel and Evaluation agencies, these organisations are far from being democratically accountable and often they become the handmaiden of the rich countries and the business interest of the rich and powerful corporations.

The role of International and National NGOs and Civil Society organisations have increased significantly both in terms of resources, network, knowledge, discourse as well as the power of influencing. These institutions and organisations function in the public sphere and most of them work on behalf of the poor and marginalized people. Hence they are public institutions and depend largely on the financial support from people or from the tax payer’s money through bilateral funding. Hence, there is an urgent need for NGOs and all Civil Society Organisation to ensure effective, transparent and accountable management. Public accountability will be a prerequisite for the moral and political legitimacy of NGOs. Without moral and political legitimacy, NGOs will have less credibility or power to influence the policy and decision makers to be accountable, just or democratic.

A vibrant and accountable political party system is very crucial for sustaining the democratic system of governance. There is indeed a link between the health and maturity of the political party systems and the state of governance in a given country. One of the key challenges for democratic accountability is the marketisation of political parties and media.

Political parties have been increasingly reduced to electoral network or instrumental mechanism to capture the State power. Politics itself has been reduced to a media exercise played by powerful nexus of political elites and media elites, often negotiated or controlled by the corporate interests of the marker forces. In many parts of the world political party system is becoming increasingly made redundant by an unholy alliance of political-corporate- media elites. This is also because of the fact that political parties and elections are more and more shaped by the corporate donations and kick backs by vested interest groups and business corporations. As a result political parties are less based on ideological or moral conviction and more by competing interests among the market elites. The crisis in political parties and its leadership signifies a crisis to the very ideal of democracy and democratization.

Hence, there is indeed a need to work towards a new ethical and political accountability framework for political party leaders and political party institutions. When political parties themselves become business enterprises in the electoral market, the very moral fiber of democratic accountability is in peril.

It is important to revitalize and reinvent the political party System with courage of conviction and deep commitment to democratic accountability. That is why we need a broader movement to rediscover a new politics and ethics of accountability in the public sphere as well as private sphere.