The vast literature on accountability in the public sector (usually called ‘public accountability’originating from political science and public administration tends to emphasize the positive dimension of holding authorities to account. As formulated by one prominent scholar in the field, ‘[a]ccountability has become an icon for good governance’: it is perceived as ‘a Good Thing, and, so it seems, we can’t have enough of it’ (Bovens, 2005: 182, 183). Accountability has, thus, become one of the central values of democratic rule – varying on a well-known American slogan one could phrase this as ‘no public responsi bility without accountability’.
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Pressure from politics and the public has created a greater demand for the media to be more accountable. Moreover, growing structural changes in the media landscape – including media concentration, commercialization, fiercer competition, an increasingly fragmented public, and the advent of new media – have also challenged how media should be accountable and responsive. This article looks at how Dutch broadcast media are responding to increasing pressure in terms of accountability and responsiveness through a case-‐study research from two leading broadcast news organizations. The need for more openness to and connection with the public is acknowledged, and among many journalists this is now even considered a necessity. However, when it comes to routinized daily application, there is a general resistance as it does not live within their professional autonomy and authority. New online instruments have created opportunities with more platforms and possibilities for the public to participate. However, at this point the online instruments put new constraints on the social system of organization with unforeseen activities and costs.
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This chapter offers a working definition of social accountability as any citizen-led action beyond elections that aims to enhance the accountability of state actors. We view social accountability as a broad array of predominantly bottom-up initiatives, aimed at improving the quality of governance (especially oversight and responsiveness) through active citizen participation. We also trace the evolution of SA as a concept in the literature over the past decades and, then, discuss some influential theoretic approaches to SAIs, pointing out strengths and weaknesses of each model. Finally, we suggest organising Arab SAIs into one of three categories: (1) transparency; (2) advocacy; or (3) participatory governance and we review each of these existing action formats by discussing their main strengths and flaws.
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The Middle East and North Africa region has been absent form stocktaking exercises on social accountability initiatives (SAI), an umbrella term to designate citizen-led tools aimed at socio-political change. We argue that this sidelining is unwarranted, given the proliferation of participatory governance initiatives, civic associations and popular mobilisation in Arab societies after 2011. Whereas the struggle for improved accountability in the Arab world remains under-researched, analysis of authoritarian regime tactics has proliferated. The fact is, however, that many Arab societies have experimented with mechanisms to apply political pressure on corrupt elites while international donors have launched diverse SAIs, including community score cards and participatory and gender-responsive budgeting initiatives. In this chapter, we first identify this double gap: not only has the literature on SAIs overlooked the MENA region but scholarship on the Middle East has largely failed to recognise initiatives launched across the region over the past decade as SAIs. Then, we aim to address the blind spot of Arab SAI’s as pathways towards improved governance. Finally, we present an overview of extant literature and introduce a set of four research questions to better understand what social accountability means for people on the ground. These questions focus on the various meanings of social accountability (musā’ala vs muhāsaba), its modes of mobilisation, the responses from authorities to such initiatives and their overall outcomes.
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News media in The Netherlands show great variety in the extent and ways, in which they realize media accountability online in terms of actor transparency, product transparency and feedback opportunities online. It is suggested that even those news rooms that seem to adhere to transparency and public accountability still need to explore the functionality and application of media accountability instruments (MAI). Both in terms of potentials and pitfalls, news rooms need to consider about what they want to be transparent and in what ways. To the extent that online innovations are visible, traditional news media seem to experiment, as is the case with newsroom blogs or the project of hyper local journalism Dichtbij.nl, part of the Telegraaf Company. Various news media have on-going projects on audience participation, online applications and distribution models. However, since many projects merely aim at finding new applications, processes, platforms and business models, it remains to be seen assess whether projects are indeed reasonably innovative and feasible at the same time. The development of an online and therefore immediate, archived, personalized and interactive context, offers practical and ethical challenges to Dutch journalism. These challenges bring shifts in its role and responsibility to society. It means that changes occur in what journalists are accountable for, as well as ways in how they are accountable. The Dutch media landscape lodges various professional accountability instruments like the press council and both profession-wide and news media specific codes of ethics, but some of these instruments receive only moderate support. Proactive openness is more an exception than the rule and may well be a distinctive indicator for quality journalism. Although news media often acknowledge the importance of media accountability offline and online, they often lack the resources or courage to use them or have different priorities. This ambiguous position may indicate that in relation to media accountability online, Dutch news media are between hope and fear: that it will either improve their relationship with the public and fuel professional quality, or ask too much of resources with too little benefit.
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Corporate Social Responsibility affects Corporate Governance as it stretches the accountability of companies beyond its traditional boundaries. This however may conflict with the corporate objective of maximizing stockholder wealth. The paper provides an overview of various academic theories and corporate attitudes on this issue and discusses the merits and disadvantages of the two main governance modes: the stockholder mode and the stakeholder mode.
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More than 25!years after Moore’s first introduction of the public value concept in 995, the concept is now widely used, but its operationalization is still considered difficult. This paper presents the empirical results of a study analyzing the application of the public value concept in Higher Education Institutions, thereby focusing on how to account for public value. The paper shows how Dutch universities of applied sciences operationalize the concept ‘public value’, and how they report on the outcome achievements. The official strategy plans and annual reports for FY2016 through FY2018 of the ten largest institutions were used. While we find that all the institutions selected aim to deliver public value, they still use performance indicators that have a more narrow orientation, and are primarily focused on processes, outputs, and service delivery quality. However, we also observe that they use narratives to show the public value they created. In this way this paper contributes to the literature on public value accounting.
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In recent decades the trend of public accountability, transparency and governance has become a priority in many public sectors, but in de media sector and the public broadcasting sector in particular there have only very recently been attempts to address the public in terms of accountability and responsiveness
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This paper investigates how management accounting and control systems (operationalized by using Simons’ (1995a) levers of control framework) can be used as devices to support public value creation and as such it contributes to the literature on public value accounting. Using a mixed methods case study approach, including documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews, we found diverging uses of control systems in the Dutch university of applied sciences we investigated. While belief and interactive control systems are used intensively for strategy change and implementation, diagnostic controls were used mainly at the decentral level and seen as devices to make sure that operational and financial boundaries were not crossed. Therefore, belief and interactive control systems lay the foundation for the implementation of a new strategy, in which concepts of public value play a large role, using diagnostic controls to constrain actions at the operational level. We also found that whereas the institution wanted to have interaction with the external stakeholders, in daily practice this takes place only at the phase of strategy formulation, but not in the phase of intermediate strategy evaluation.
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In this chapter, we first summarise the findings from the country chapters on the multiple meanings of SA, documenting terms, translations and contrasting understandings between citizens and public officials. Second, we highlight how civil mobilisation tends to be cyclical over time and is often mediated by brokers. Strategies to spur stakeholders into action rely on a delicate balance of both collaboration and confrontation. Third, we examine the responses from authorities to SAIs, finding that reactions are uneven and that all civic innovators fear appropriation or co-optation by officials. Fourth, we assess overall outcomes of Arab SAIs and highlight that the transformative potential of SAIs exists especially at municipal level, if four conditions for success are present (trust, proximity, endorsement, evaluation). We also point out that the actual outcomes of SAIs in Arab societies have, so far, been limited due to design deficiencies (emphasising short-term objectives and limited context sensitivity) or because of officials’ resistance in active or passive forms. We characterise SAIs as a discursive action format that is best understood with a relational approach to power. In a final section, we formulate recommendations for activists, officials and donors on how to make SAIs more effective.
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