Accountability and Networks: Mind the Gap
The principal lesson of this chapter is that politics is the driving force for change, not managerial or technocratic efficiency drivers; managerialism is a tool of control. This has profound consequences for issues of accountability. The chapter focuses
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Accountability and Networks: Mind the Gap Andrew Massey
This chapter focuses on the properties and contours of accountability within the context of the contemporary UK reform agendas. Furthermore, it sets this alongside the public value debate and discusses the potential ways in which the increased complexity of new kinds of accountability, that is, ways in which accountability is differently emphasised and targeted, can adversely affect the pursuit of public value. The chapter also considers issues such as blame-gaming, culpability avoidance and how networkbased approaches to reform pose difficulties for transparent lines of accountability. We need to remember that states, and their public administration systems, are comprised of individuals who are also members of institutions. Institutions cannot possess a human personality, but consist of people all with a persona. Institutions are designed to control people and to serve them simultaneously. John (2018, p. 1) neatly encapsulates this: We live in an age of large public policy problems that governments find hard to solve. These include obesity, climate change, terrorism, race discrimination,
A. Massey (*) International School for Government, Kings College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 J. Connolly, A. van der Zwet (eds.), Public Value Management, Governance and Reform in Britain, International Series on Public Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55586-3_8
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corruption and youth unemployment … these problems share their origin in human behavioural traits that persist over time. Behaviours create and sustain poor outcomes, both for individual citizens and communities …. Effective policy outcomes usually depend on some degree of citizen action and responsiveness.
Individual behaviour and response to policy initiatives, however, are often transmitted through peer groups and ‘close social networks’ (John 2018, p. 1). As governments have restructured, reformed and re- engineered the state and its institutions, the interactions and citizen responses to global issues with a local impact, such as recycling, immunisation or cultural integration, have become integral to governance. The issue of accountability, therefore, often lies at the heart of institutional responses. Individuals, however, are members of a range of formal and informal institutions, such as families, cultural groups, civil society groups, employing organisations, religious groups, social media sites and occasionally even political parties. These all contribute to a society’s governance structures and are integral to overlapping networks of individuals and institutions, some of which are engaged in the policy process and, in the case of many parts of civil society, are also part of a governance network that clouds lines of political and social accountability (Bevir 1995, p. 171). In this chapter, literature on policy networks and accountability is examined in order to bring such challenges to the fore in the context of public val
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