Accountability Regimes Research Articles

Outcome-based accountability regimes in OECD countries: a global policy model?

ABSTRACT The global diffusion of outcome-based accountability in education is contested, with accounts of universal convergence being challenged by perspectives emphasising heterogeneity across different national or local contexts. This study uses data from PISA to explore, firstly, the spatial and temporal diffusion of accountability across OECD countries, and secondly, whether accountability is implemented as a single coherent regime. Using cluster analysis techniques, we find that most countries fall into a ‘Thick’ accountability regime, with widespread use of most forms of accountability tools. However, this regime is not fully coherent, with some countries relying more on horizontal, and others on vertical, forms of accountability. A sizeable minority of countries fall into a ‘Thin’ regime, in which most accountability tools are largely absent. We also find indications of convergence across countries over time. We conclude that while accountability in education is indeed widespread, and increasingly so, it is not a universally dominant regime.

Coping with performance expectations: towards a deeper understanding of variation in school principals’ responses to accountability demands

In recent decades, performance-based accountability (PBA) has become an increasingly popular policy instrument to ensure educational actors are responsive to and assume responsibility for achieving centrally defined learning goals. Nonetheless, studies report mixed results with regard to the impact of PBA on schools’ internal affairs and instructional practices. With the aim of contributing to the understanding of the social mechanisms and processes that induce particular school responses, this paper reports on a study that examines how Norwegian principals perceive, interpret, and translate accountability demands. The analysis is guided by the policy enactment perspective and the sociological concept of “reactivity”, and relies on 23 in-depth interviews with primary school principals in nine urban municipalities in Norway. The findings highlight three distinct response patterns in how principals perceive, interpret, and translate PBA demands: alignment, balancing multiple purposes, and symbolic responses. The study simultaneously shows how different manifestations of two social mechanisms form important explanatory factors to understand principals’ varying responses, while it is highlighted how the mechanisms are more likely to operate under particular conditions, which relate both to principals’ trajectories and views on education, and to school-specific characteristics and the local accountability regime. The study contributes to the accountability literature by showing how, even in the relative absence of material consequences and low levels of marketization, standardized testing and PBA can drive behavioral change, by reframing norms of good educational practice and by affecting how educators make sense of core aspects of their work.

MEASURING THE IMPACT OF FACTORS ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF FINANCIAL STATEMENTS UNDER THE NEW ACCOUTING REGIME AT THE PUBLIC SERVICE AND ADMINISTRATION UNITS IN VIETNAM

This study examines the impact of subjective and objective factors affecting the implementation of financial statements under the new regulations of public service and administration units in Vietnam. The research model and hypothesis has been tested by SmartPLS3 software with 213 survey samples from accountants andmanagers working in public units in Vietnam. Research results show that: (1) The capacity of accountants at theunits has a positive impact on the implementation of financial statements according to the new accounting regime;(2) The content of the new accounting regime and inspection activities of functional agencies have a positive impact on the implementation of financial statements according to the new accounting regime. These results provide some implications for the theory and implications of governance for public entities in Vietnam in implementing financial statements to improve the quality of information on financial statements, serving the needs of increasing accountability and decision-making of units.

The game of accountability: perspectives of urban school leaders on standardized testing in Ontario and British Columbia, Canada

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how test-based, standardized accountability is impacting on urban school leaders’ everyday work in Ontario and British Columbia, Canada. This critical policy analysis draws on theories of new public management and governmentality to document the experiences of school leaders as they enact and navigate test-based accountability policies. The data for this empirical study was collected from semi-structured interviews with 18 school leaders in 4 high schools from two cities: Toronto and Vancouver. As a result of different education policy contexts in Ontario and British Columbia, findings reveal that there were both similarities and differences between the experiences of school leaders therein. In Ontario, school leaders face tremendous pressure to provide evidence of improved test scores as part of an accountability regime that is high-stakes. In both provincial contexts, the mediatization of test scores places new demands on school leaders who act as entrepreneurs, marketing and selling their schools. Ultimately, the research highlights the unintended consequences of test-based accountability systems as contributing to the marketization of education in Canada with deleterious consequences for marginalized communities and the practice of social justice leadership in schools. There is a need to identify democratic and holistic measures of accountability.

National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) for Indian cities: Review and outlook of clean air action plans

National Clean Air Programme (NCAP), launched in 2019, is India's flagship program for better air quality in 122 cities. This review evaluates the scientific, legislative, financial, and institutional framework of the 102 publicly available clean air action plans submitted under NCAP. We assessed the robustness of the plans using the background information on pollution sources and their contribution; legal backing for the clean air action plan; cost of measures; and existing institutional accountability regime. We used the tally chart method for estimating city-specific and sector-specific mitigation measures, the number of actions under the purview of various implementation agencies, and the number of institutional, physical, and promotional interventions in the plans. Transport and road dust together cover 50% of action points, followed by interventions for the industries. Domestic cooking and heating is mentioned as a source only in 42 plans for a total of 2% of the action points. Institutional nature of the interventions was observed in 74% of the action points, using the language “overseeing, planning, proposing, preparing, investigating, identifying, ensuring, strengthening, training, studying, and engaging”. We also identified the plans that contained information on source contributions, an outline of financial requirements for executing the plans and measures for mitigating pollution from regional sources. Only 25% of the plans integrated information on the relative source contributions to formulate control strategies. Even fewer plans outlined the financial requirements for executing the plans. The institutional and administrative arrangements for ensuring inter-departmental and regional alignment in air pollution mitigation strategies are absent. We close the review with recommendations which include mandating regular updates for emission and pollution loads, granting greater fiscal autonomy for Urban Local Bodies to maintain the infrastructure necessary for sustaining air quality benefits, and moving from city-centric to airshed-centric air quality management. • Review of India's 102 publicly available city clean air action plans. • Review of the institutional, legal, and administrative arrangements for regional air quality management. • Review of availability of city-specific information on source contributions and financial commitments. • NCAP requires a central executor with legal mandate to prioritize actions and an institutional mechanism to track progress.

Metadata Realities for Cyberinfrastructure: Data Authors as Metadata Creators

Author(s): Mayernik, Matthew S | Abstract: As digital data creation technologies become more prevalent, data and metadata management are necessary to make data available, usable, sharable, and storable. Researchers in many scientific settings, however, have little experience or expertise in data and metadata management. In this dissertation, I explore the everyday data and metadata management practices of researchers through a multi-sited ethnographic study of metadata creation by researchers in the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). In studying metadata practices, I focused on the ways that researchers document, describe, annotate, organize, and manage their data, both for their own use and the use of researchers outside of their project. This study illustrates how researchers within CENS rarely create documentation that is not directly tied to their own use of their data, and correspondingly, they rarely share data with users from outside of their immediate projects. From these observations, I develop a metadata typology that includes six components, including metadata for: data identity, data characteristics, data quality, data collection equipment, data collection methods, and data analysis methods. I use a framework of accountability to discuss the ways that metadata practices fit within social research settings. Metadata are situated in regimes of mutual accountability in which researchers learn what is important to document, what counts as sufficient documentation, and how documentation practices are to be accounted for in social research settings. Researchers work within social ontologies in which “metadata-for-data sharing” have very low visibility. As a consequence, when asked to create metadata descriptions of the data for a shared CENS metadata registry, researchers lack specific data users, and thus describe their data for members of their most likely “imagined public:” other researchers with shared research interests and methods. I argue that the cyberinfrastructure vision of wide-spread data sharing is fundamentally mis-aligned with the realities of the day-to-day metadata practices of researchers in small-scale field sciences.

Is Administrative Law at War with Itself?

Recent Supreme Court jurisprudence in administrative law seems to embrace two competing visions of administrative legality and democratic legitimacy. On the one hand the Court is increasingly skeptical of congressional limitations on presidential powers of removal of administrative officers. This jurisprudence emphasizes the necessity for direct accountability of administrative officers to the president and responsiveness to presidential preferences as a fundamental requisite for democratic accountability in the administrative state. On the other, the Court is insistent that administrators provide reasons for their actions, reasons that respond to the language and purposes of their governing statutes and to the records compiled and arguments offered in participatory administrative proceedings. This jurisprudence reinforces a vision of democracy grounded in assembly government and deliberative processes. This article argues that the tensions between these two visions of legality and legitimacy are real, but that, properly understood, they articulate a complex accountability regime that seeks to make good on the Constitution's promise of democracy and the rule of law. These tensions and institutional complexities are built into our constitutional system and administrative law's attempt to manage them affirms rather than undermines the legitimacy of the American administrative state.

Accountability and Troubling the Caring Ideal in the Classroom: A Call to Teacher Citizenry

This work considers challenges facing the classroom caring ideal that Nel Noddings’ ethics of care theory exemplifies. It is evident that conditions of a neoliberal regime of accountability, a contested Common Core, and high stakes testing undermine the plausibility of this vaunted relation in the classroom. Along these lines, market logics operating in K-12 education can further hinder the predominantly white teaching force from caring for their Black and brown students. Given the forced prioritization of care that accountability policies generate, I propose an alternate ethic of teacher citizenry, which is reasoned commitment to the educational well-being of each child. As a civic virtue, teacher citizenry encapsulates the responsibility that teachers have to themselves, students, and other democratic stakeholders in light of being co-citizens/citizens-in-the-making. Such considerations can inform critically reflexive determinations in a manner consistent with a democratic subject striving to exhibit civic virtues. The profession’s public function acts a reasonable moral constraint that grounds its ethical norms within the political morality of participatory democracy. Teacher citizenry liberates the practitioner to make the moral calculus rather than merely a prudential one that failing to meet the ethics of care standard can compel.

The Logics of Hybrid Accountability: When the State, the Market, and Professionalism Interact

The delivery of public services increasingly operates under hybrid accountability regimes, but we have much to learn about how these regimes interrelate. I develop a framework for systematic analysis of hybrid public, market, and professional accountability arrangements, looking at the compatibility of their content, steering mechanisms, and relationships. The analysis is informed and illustrated by empirical studies on accountability in welfare state services, which offer evidence on hybrid accountability arrangements. The article concludes by discussing the interplay between accountability regimes and the conditions in which they undermine or reinforce each other. I argue that compatibility between regimes depends on the content of accountability rather than on the accountability mechanisms, and I highlight the importance of the trust between the parties entering into accountability relations and the proximity of their institutional logics.

Performing accountability in petroleum resource governance in a shrinking democratic space: The case of Tanzania

Accountability is a multifaceted concept fraught with ambiguity. In contributing to the critical literature on transparency and accountability, this paper explores how accountability in extractive resource governance is conceived and re-shaped as a consequence of the changing political context in the host country, using recent experiences in the emerging petroleum industry in Tanzania as the case. Based on a qualitative research design, the paper argues that the presentation of “accountability” is contextual, malleable, and ambiguous because it must satisfy both international standards and local political requirements. In the shrinking democratic space in Tanzania, accountability is defined and anchored in the context of a particularistic and historicised ideology in contrast to the universal principles upon which the international accountability regime is based. Interestingly, the two divergent principles of accountability co-exist and are accommodated in the same discourse on accountability mechanisms in the nascent petroleum industry in Tanzania, which is possible because ambiguity is inherent in the concept of accountability. Thus, resource governance accountability in Tanzania should be viewed and analysed as a dual process and not as mutually understood and accepted institutions and practices.

Shadow Elite of Teacher Education Reforms: Intermediary Organizations’ Construction of Accountability Regimes

In the 2010s, teacher education witnessed the rise of accountability regimes. Studies examining efforts to introduce teacher preparation accountability focused predominantly on federal or state actors, leaving the involvement of intermediary organizations in the construction of these regimes largely underexplored. To address this gap, I analyze nonprofit and for-profit actors’ advocacy for teacher preparation accountability. Using the tools of anthropology of policy and social network analysis, I demonstrate that these actors’ success rests on their ability to work together as a flex net, or a collective that pursues a shared vision and pools together resources to accomplish a common agenda.

Fundamental Valuation in Seven Asian Countries: Role of Earnings, Book Value, and Dividends

We examine the role of earnings, book value, and dividends in examining the valuation of firms in select Asian countries. Besides the usual variables of earnings and book value, inclusion of dividends is motivated by prior use of the variable in the literature, as well as an adaptation of the Ohlson 2001 empirical specification of the valuation model. In our specification, absent credible analysts’ forecasts, as is typical in these markets, dividends together with earnings play the role of “other information” in explaining stock prices. In a large sample of Asian firms from seven Asian countries that lack an active analyst community, we document two key results. First, the model with earnings, book value, and dividends outperforms the earnings capitalization, book value, and a model with earnings and book value together, the traditional benchmarks used in the literature. This is in contrast to Ashbaugh and Olsson, 2002 who find that earnings capitalization is the best model for the international firms. Second, the ability of the model to explain stock valuations does not vary materially over time, thus indicating reasonable consistency across different accounting regimes in these countries that may include International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adaptation at different paces. Our finding highlights the information role of earnings and dividends when other channels of information are blocked.

Extractive entanglements and regimes of accountability at an undeveloped mining project

This paper uses a case study of Community Relations and Development (CRD) field practitioners at the Frieda River Project – an advanced copper and gold exploration venture in the upper Sepik region of Papua New Guinea – to contrast the professional arenas in which corporate social responsibility (CSR) mechanisms tend to be strategically developed, and the deeply relational contexts in which they are implemented on the ground, in the project location. It provides insights into experiences of site-level CRD personnel tasked with implementation of community relations and development programmes, and offers an audit of their perceptions regarding their role and the value they bring to the design of complex orebody projects. The article explores the role of ‘CSR’ and ‘sustainable development’ in the framing of the company's engagement with local stakeholders – assessed from the perspective of CRD officers. Contextualising research material within debates about CSR in the resource extraction industry, the paper shows that while the discourse of CSR was ultimately born out of acknowledgements of companies' entanglements in their wider operating environments, its mechanisms can be used to promote the ethics of detachment, and may serve to distance companies from the complexities of the environments in which they operate.

From responsibilization to responsiveness through metrics: Smart meter deployment in Australia

Smart meters are a central element in strategies to create data-rich environments that enhance the rationalization and technical optimization of electricity production and consumption. Bold claims are made by industry and government that smart measurement devices will enable a new class of responsibilizing subjects who can be nudged and incentivized to orchestrate efficient low carbon energy governance. The carbon governmentality literature reveals the microphysics of power involved in responsibilization-as-governance. However, it insufficiently explains how the individualization of responsibility is shaped by and coexists with other sectoral and policy priorities, and political-economic imperatives. I show how the obdurate political-economic relations of the Australian electricity sector shape what can be measured, who can do the measuring, and who can access the metrics from smart meters. Utopian promises to govern for all by metrics are constrained by industry accumulation strategies, weak regulation and the embedded inequalities of infrastructural projects. I then show how responsibilization is being eclipsed by responsiveness as the new regime of accountability. Responsiveness bypasses active individual consumer decision-making, in favour of technologically-mediated automated processes. I show how responsiveness regimes are being driven by new whole-of-economy accumulation opportunities and enabled through the creation of a weakly-regulated sectoral market for electricity consumption data. Metering is a crucial but insufficient condition for the larger assemblage of responsiveness that involves data mobility through third party access, new forms of market competition, and value creation in demand response.

Institutional Ethnography and the Materiality of Affect: Affective Circuits as Indicators of Other Possibilities

Many studies have utilized institutional ethnography (IE) to reveal the social relations that govern how things are put together at the frontline of work, particularly in the public sector and education. The focus has generally been on restrictive practices associated with accountability regimes of new public management. Less analytic attention has been paid, however, to discovering ways in which workers are finding how it can be otherwise. Revisiting the data from a longitudinal study, originally conducted as an IE, provided an opportunity to trace the influence of affect in relation to teachers’ practices. Grounded in empirical data, this article makes a case for the methodological innovation of tracing the work done by affect, as part of an IE, in order to reveal possibilities for resistance.

Global Business and Financial Cycles: A Tale of Two Capital Account Regimes

Using a new equity price-based measure of the global financial cycle, this paper evaluates the relative importance of global financial shocks for quarterly equity returns and output growths in a large sample of advanced and emerging economies, as well as in South Korea and China--two countries on different sides of the trilemma triangle of international finance. We document that global financial shocks in both China and South Korea explain a substantial share of equity return variability (20 and 50 percent of the total variance, respectively), but a much smaller portion of real output fluctuations (less than 10 percent in Korea and negligible in the case of China). We also find that the combination of a closer capital account and a more rigid exchange rate regime, as in China, is associated with some costs in terms of diversification opportunities quantified by very large exposures to domestic financial and real shocks, dwarfing the contribution of any other shock in the model. More surprisingly, the combination of a relatively open capital account and a flexible exchange rate, as in South Korea, not only is associated with higher exposure to the global financial cycle than in China but also with a significant incidence of domestic financial shocks on output fluctuations. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Optimizing rotation periods of forest plantations: The effects of carbon accounting regimes

Forests have a huge potential to produce timber and sequester carbon in a joint process. Thus, afforestation projects have been widely undertaken across countries to achieve poverty alleviation and environment protection goals, specifically in reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Our study determines the optimal rotation periods of afforestation projects with three different tree species (Chinese fir, Eucalyptus, and Poplar) in various Chinese regions. Applying a modified Hartman rotation model, our results show that the optimal rotation period increases for all examined species, when considering the joint production of timber and carbon sequestration. However, they also indicate that carbon accounting regimes have a significant impact on the optimum rotation as well as on the revenue calculations. We distinguish between temporary (tCER) and long-term (lCER) Certified Emission Reductions. The present value of lCER revenues is three to four times higher than those generated by tCER for the same plantation in the initial 5 to 10 years. In contrast, when the project period extends to 30 years, the present value of lCER revenues is at least two times lower than the present value of tCERs. Therefore, forest managers have an incentive to apply tCER accounting to finance slow-growing plantations, and lCER for fast-growing ones. We conduct a sensitivity analysis with respect to changes in discount rates and carbon prices. While the optimal decision for Chinese fir is highly sensitive to changes in both variables under tCER accounting, the results concerning Eucalyptus are most sensitive under the lCER accounting regime. In contrast, carbon revenues have a minimal impact on the optimal rotation of Poplar plantations, no matter which regime is applied. Our findings can contribute to the efficient and sustainable management of carbon sequestration projects, while the methodology can also be applied to other regions in the developing world.

The application of simplified financial reporting for micro and small enterprises in Central and Eastern Europe

Micro- and small enterprises (MSE) have come to constitute the most dynamic element of growth in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Only through transparent reporting and com-municating information on sustainability work and performance can MSEs build their reputation and trust, attract new capital, and develop a competitive advantage. The paper aims to provide a cross-country analysis of the financial-reporting requirements concerning MSEs, a few years after the introduction of Directive 2013/34/EU. The paper focuses on the transposition of the Directive into the national laws of sixteen CEE-region countries. The objectives have been achieved through a systematic review of the current academic literature, and an analysis of national legislation and questionnaires developed for academics. It turned out that a country’s political status does not affect the implementation of the Di-rective. Moreover, although the Directive allows countries to take the specific conditions of their markets into account when making decisions regarding the size thresholds and a simplified accounting regime, most CEE countries have applied standard definitions and requirements. As a consequence, in almost all CEE countries, about 90% of entities may draw up abridged financial reports, which significantly limits the use of financial statements for decision making.

Hybrid contractual landscapes of governance: Generation of fragmented regimes of public accountability through urban regeneration

In this article we explore the idea of public accountability in the contemporary entrepreneurial governance of cities, which are influenced by market dependency and private sector involvement. We specifically focus on the fragmentation of public accountability through hybrid contractual landscapes of governance, in which the public and private sector actors interactively produce a diversity of instruments to ensure performance in service. This is in sharp contrast to the traditional vague norms and values appealed to by urban planning institutions, to safeguard the public interest. We argue that within these complex contractual governance environments public accountability is produced by public and private sector actors, through highly diverse sets of contractual relations and diverse control instruments that define responsibilities of diverse actors who are involved in a project within a market-dependent planning and policy making environment, which contains context-specific characteristics set by the specific rules of public-private collaboration. These complexities mean public accountability has become fragmented and largely reduced to performance control. Moreover, our understanding of contractual urban governance remains vague and unclear due to very limited empirical studies focusing on the actual technologies of contractual urban development. By deciphering the complex hybrid landscapes of contractual governance, with comparative empirical evidence from The Netherlands, UK and Brazil, we demonstrate how public accountability is assuming a more ‘contractual’ and unpredictable meaning in policy and plan implementation process.

The Complexity of Criminal Liability of AI Systems

Technology is advancing at a rapid pace. As we anticipate a rapid increase in artificial intelligence (AI), we may soon find ourselves dealing with fully autonomous technology with the capacity to cause harm and injuries. What then? Who is going to be held accountable if AI systems harm us?Currently there is no answer to this question and the existing regulatory framework falls short in addressing the accountability regime of autonomous systems. This paper analyses criminal liability of AI systems, evaluated under the existing rules of criminal law. It highlights the social and legal implications of the current criminal liability regime as it is applied to the complex nature of industrial robots. Finally, the paper explores whether corporate liability is a viable option and what legal standards are possible for imposing criminal liability on the companies who deploy AI systems.The paper reveals that traditional criminal law and legal theory are not well positioned to answer the questions at hand, as there are many practical problems that require further evaluation. I have demonstrated that with the development of AI, more questions will surface and legal frameworks will inevitably need to adapt. The conclusions of this paper could be the basis for further research.