Accountability

Accountability

Accountability can be broadly defined as the obligation of those holding power to take responsibility for their behaviour and actions. This obligation might stem out of a legal requirement or out of a moral-ethical need to account for one's behaviour. It is a relational concept as it concerns the relationship between those that perform an action or deliver a service, and those for whom the action or service is performed.

Accountability in Governance

Accountability refers to processes or mechanisms whereby the performance of duties or functions carried out by government institutions and officials is subject to oversight or scrutiny by appropriate authorities and relevant stakeholders. Basically, it ensures that government institutions are complying with the established rules and regulations and that those who have roles in different aspects of governance are answerable to their actions and results. Actualizing accountability involves two critical aspects:

• Determining who should be accountable to whom and for what.
• Developing the institutional mechanisms and incentive-sanction structures on the basis of which accountability is realized.

Elements of Accountability

Accountability is a multi-dimensional concept. It pertains to the relationship between citizens and government officials, along with a sense of obligation and public service ethos among officials and the power of citizens or shareholders to sanction, impose costs, or remove officials for unsatisfactory performance or actions. Basically, there are various elements that come together with the notion of accountability. These include:

Answerability: Answerability refers to the obligation of the government, its agencies and public officials to provide information about their decisions and actions and to justify them to the public and those institutions of accountability tasked with providing oversight.

Responsibility: It involves accepting responsibility for actions and decisions as well as their results. This includes both independent and shared elements.

Enforcement: Enforcement refers to the ability of the public or the institution responsible for accountability to impose sanctions on the offending party (individual or institution). It is the ability of the public to impose sanction on those who violate their mandate if the actions or justification for the actions are found to be unsatisfactory.

Traditional Forms of Accountability

Traditionally, the efforts to improve accountability in governance have proceeded along two axis- horizontal and vertical, that are largely independent of one another.

Vertical Accountability: This refers to the traditional link between citizen and state through formal mechanisms, most usually through local and national elections. Elections are the main mechanism through which citizens make their voting decisions depending on their evaluation of whether government delivered on its promises during its term. Electoral reforms and voter awareness initiatives are some of the measures that enforce vertical accountability.

Horizontal Accountability: This typically refers to the internal mechanisms of checks and balances within the government to ensure that government is performing its duties in the interest of its citizens. In horizontal accountability, the state actors- judiciary, elected politicians, officially appointed auditors are the designated seekers of accountability.

• Constitution provides for separation of powers among judiciary, executive and legislature and an official oversight of one's performance by the other. For instance, the legislature holds the executive politically accountable (political oversight) through planning and budgeting and ministerial oversight. Similarly, accountability is sought to be administered in a parliamentary system through questions, debates, discussions, budgetary approvals, committees and such other methods by the Parliament. Meanwhile, the independent judiciary plays a powerful role in holding both executive and legislative branches to account.
• Special bodies like Comptroller & Auditor General (CAG), Ombudsman, Vigilance Commissions, Anti-Corruption Bureau act as horizontal accountability establishing mechanisms. These bodies perform an oversight of various government activities and conduct investigations into misdoings, all with a view to create a restraint on abuse of power and in effect deliver accountable governance.

However, vertical and horizontal accountability measures are not sufficient to ensure that public money is actually spent in accordance with existing regulations and standards and for the intended purpose.

Crisis of Accountability

It is widely recognized that governance in India today faces a serious crisis of accountability. The very fact that despite significant economic growth, and substantial increases in social sector expenditures, India continues to perform far worse than countries much poorer than it on key development parameters is an indicator of just how deep the problem of accountability is. Accountability failures have meant that absenteeism incompetence, inefficiency and corruption characterize every core service that the state is obliged to deliver to its citizens.

While there are both vertical and horizontal institutional frameworks to ensure accountability yet in the de facto implementation and delivery, there is rampant corruption, absenteeism, indifference, incompetence, inefficiencies or outright failures. At the heart of these failures, is a systemic crisis of accountability.

There have been several reports on how participation of citizens in planning and implementation of projects such as citizens' input and feedback not only increase the effectiveness of public service delivery and make it more appropriate, but also increase accountability and reduce corruption. Considering this, it has been realized that additional accountability mechanisms are required that allow for more direct participation of citizens in accountability processes beyond elections, termed as diagonal or social accountability.

Public/Social Accountability

Social accountability can be defined as an approach towards building accountability that relies on civic engagement, i.e., in which it is the ordinary citizens and/or the civil society organizations who participate directly or indirectly in exacting accountability. The aim of this civic engagement is to stimulate demand from citizens and thus put pressure on the state or the private sector to meet their obligations to provide quality services. In essence, social accountability refers to the broad range of actions and mechanisms that citizens or civil society can engage in to hold the state (represented by public officials and service providers) accountable.

Need for Public/Social Accountability In a democracy, the main instrument that citizens can use to hold the government accountable is periodic elections. However, in practice, as has been shown by many studies, free and fair elections are insufficient to ensure that duty bearers and service providers adhere to the principles of good governance like rule of law, transparency and accountability. More over, elections only hold elected officials accountable, where as the vast majority of public officials are appointed bureaucrats and hence not subject to electoral processes.

The institutional mechanism to ensure vertical accountability has increasingly proved to be ineffective for reasons of decline in the quality and character of debates and the representatives, transformation of parliamentary system into a cabinet system of government, criminalization of politics and fragmentation of society and politics.

Horizontal accountability channels also have their limitations. It is impossible to monitor the almost infinite number of government actions (and inactions). Practices like bias and inefficient resource use are more difficult to investigate than express forms of corruption. Moreover, absence of second order accountability, lack of adequate funding and limited enforcement capacity further weakens these mechanisms.

Concept and Fundamentals of Social Accountability

In a democracy, the concept of social accountability stems out of the fact that it is the citizens that elect a government and invest the elected representatives with the power to govern them. Therefore, the government on its part, is obliged to perform its duties of governance in a manner that keeps the citizens' interests at heart. It affirms the fundamental principle that duty-bearers (public officials and service providers) are accountable to rights-holders (citizens).

Social accountability is about being answerable for the decisions made, the executions done and the results of the public programmes and schemes implemented by the government. For instance, in case of selection of beneficiaries for the MGNREGA programme in a village, the accountability will imply whether the selection has been carried out by applying the criteria, and following the procedures laid down, in the timely manner within the budgets specified.

Unlike the horizontal accountability mechanisms that are backed up by legally defined sanctions (that should ideally prevent, or at least punish mis use of office), in social accountability there lack mechanisms to sanction misuse of office. Thus, social accountability remains complementary to and dependent on other forms of accountability in order to be effective and it cannot replace these other mechanisms. The success of mechanisms of social accountability depends upon the ability and willingness of citizens and civil society organisations (CSOS) to take proactive actions aimed at holding the state to account; as well as positive response on the part of the state to take cognizance of its citizenry's needs and demands and create incentives for providers to satisfy the citizens' wishes and be accountable to them. In other words, the pressure to enhance accountability could emanate from two different sources:

Government: Here the precondition is that the political and bureaucratic leadership is motivated to usher in reform.

Civil Society: In many countries, it is the civil society institutions (such as citizens' organisations and networks, independent media and think tanks) that put pressure for increasing and articulate the demand for reforms.

Social accountability approaches can be applied at local to national level and can target a range of governance issues and processes including public information-sharing, policy- making and planning; analysis and tracking of public budgets, expenditures and procurement processes: participatory monitoring and evaluation of public service delivery, as well as broader oversight roles, anti-corruption measures and complaints handling mechanisms.

Significance/Importance of Social Accountability

Social accountability alters the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed, or those who provide and receive services. Improved social accountability aggregates the voice of people and helps to change passive 'subjects' into active citizens' and offers them an alternative to move beyond protesting and to engage constructively with government. By making or holding duty bearers and service providers answerable to the public, it reinforces (or sometimes even establishes) the notion that those who govern can only do so based on the mandate given to them (directly or indirectly) by the electorate and that the mandate can be withdrawn or altered. Social accountability promotes the practice of good governance by reducing the misuse of office and thus improves the trust and confidence citizens have in the state as a legitinate institution.

Transparency & Accountability: Two Sides of the Same Coin

There is an inextricable link between transparency and accountability; both are reciprocally supporting. Essentially the term accountability encapsulates three main elements- answerability (the need for justification of actions); enforcement (the sanction that could be imposed if the action or justification of actions is found to be unsatisfactory): and responsiveness (the ability of those held accountable to respond to the demands madel And Interwoven in these core elements is the notion of transparency, which is defined as the degree to which information is available to outsiders that enables them to make informed decisions and or to assess the performance of the insiders'. The links between transparency and accountability can be studied as follows: -

• Transparency of information is instrumental in demanding accountability because without information individuals cannot know the excesses being committed by the state.
• Transparency of information is also seen as significant for motivating citizens to exercise voice' power. Voice power is defined as the capacity of citizens to pressurize the frontline/ government officials in ensuring effective delivery of services.
• It is assumed that access to information mobilizes citizens for collective action and this in turn puts pressure on the service providers. In a nutshell, greater transparency leads to more empowerment, and thus, more participation.
• Transparency is an important tool of accountability. When institutional operations are not transparent, it can increase transactional costs, reduce the efficiency of public services, distort the decision-making process and underrnine social values. A transparent system promotes integrity and ethical behaviour on the part of officials, which will improve the functioning of the administration.
• Mere knowledge of what entitlements are, and who is responsible for fulfilling them, is not enough in ensuring that public services are adequately and effectively delivered to the 'intended' beneficiaries. This is where the systems and cultures of accountability become crucial.

Transparency is the disclosure of the information related to government processes, decisions and results in a transparent manner in front of the stakeholders. Accountability requires transparency so that actions can be scrutinized and performance can be assessed. In a democracy, the principle of accountability holds that government officials whether elected or appointed by those who have been elected are responsible to the citizenry for their decisions and actions. In order that officials may be held accountable, the principle of transparency requires that the decisions and actions of those in government are open to public scrutiny and the public has a right to access government information. Both concepts are central to the very idea of democratic governance.

Mechanisms/Instruments for Enhancing Transparency and Accountability in Governance

• RTI: Providing freedom of information;
• Social Audits: Community monitoring of public service delivery;
• Participatory budgeting and public expenditure tracking;
• Public commissions and hearings;
• Citizen report cards and community score cards;
• Citizen Advisory Boards;
• Citizen Charters;
• Petitions and investigative journalism;
• Public Interest Litigation (PIL): Accountability is also ensured through judicial review of the government decisions or laws for prompt action on certain issues affecting the common life.

Impediments in Transparency and Accountability

Many commentators caution that access to information does not necessarily lead to greater citizen participation, state accountability and state responsiveness. There are real structural and political barriers which hinder both the capacity and incentives of governments to produce information, and the ability of citizens to claim their right to information and to use it to demand better governance and public services. These barriers include:

Excessive Rules: It had been argued that the system of government in India is so opaque that ordinary citizens do not have much information about how decisions are made and how public resources are utilized. Governments induce both to restrict and facilitate the flow of information. Governments also adopt a variety of domestic institutions (laws, regulations and procedures, such as administrative review) designed to regulate the flow of information. The information space is impinged upon by these laws and regulations that assert security or privacy concerns. Such clampdowns on information have significant impact on the availability of information.

Discretion Without Accountability: In numerous occasion the government is the sole repository (and/or producer) of these data, and it has complete discretion as to whether to release it or not.

Lack of Service Culture in Government: Many a times, government officials are not actively supportive of the Right to Information, particularly in contexts where there is a legacy of undemocratic political systems or closed government. The experiences of ordinary citizens in most villages, towns and districts are often tiring in the absence of designated Public Information Officers (PIOS) or non-cooperative behaviour of PIOS.

Poor Record Management and Statistics Generation: Access to information depends on well organized records and a professional civil service. Responding to citizen requests for information requires well worked-out routines for saving documents and making them available for the citizens which can be costly in terms of monetary and human resources. However, in most of the government departments, record management and statistics generation is insufficient to support access to information.

Structural Barriers: The potential contribution to good governance of access to information lies in both the willingness of government to be transparent, as well as the ability of citizens to demand and use information, both of which may be constrained in low capacity settings. For example, access to the Internet remains low, particularly in remote areas. Meanwhile, disclosure of information (on government websites as well as on Citizen's Charters) at state or national levels is mostly in English language, and largely through only web-based tools. This has resulted in systematic exclusion of poor and illiterate as well as non-English speaking masses. Besides these, a lack of resources to publish information is another constraint in the flow of information.

Constraints in Success of E-governance Initiatives: Not many of the e-governance initiatives have resulted in publicly accessible databases. There are issues regarding data reusability (technologically, in terms of machine readability and openness of formats), data reusability (legally), easy accessibility (via search engines, for persons with disabilities, etc.), and understandability (marked up with annotations and metadata).

Poor Protection of Whistleblowers: There are discrepancies between legal and actual protection of whistleblowers. A legal right of protection is difficult to implement, since an organizations retaliation against 'traitors' can be sophisticated and subtle and therefore difficult to prosecute.