The congress will bring together government professionals, academics and practitioners,
PhD students and young researchers in public administration and management, as well
as contributors from other disciplines who will exchange on the following main theme:
Rethinking Responsibility and Accountability of Public Administration in Times of
Globalization, Decentralization and Privatization
All over the world, governments have to cope with a double pressure. On the one hand,
they are confronted with increasing demands, concerns and interests of the global
community to address increasingly complex problems. On the other hand, limited resources
and rising demand for decentralization and administrative reforms, including privatization
and contracting out have more often led to the delegation of these complex problems to
local governments, non-governmental and private organizations, and to a fragmentation
of responsibilities. Increasingly complex problems tend to be delegated to an increasing
number of actors of different types.
However, national governments remain the main responsible actor and, if a problem occurs,
they will often be blamed for poor service delivery and/or for the poor management of these
complex networks of service delivery. Is this responsibility inevitable?
Accountability implies an obligation for an organization or agent to report its achievements a
delegation to answer questions and take note of its comments to improve its performance.
It initially involves explicit or implicit commitments, actions, a review of the results, a reporting
system and an improvement process.
Accountability is important for the wealth of democratic life and the quality of public services.
It contributes to the legitimacy of public organizations in finalizing their authority. Within these
organizations, it contributes to the rigor and to the continuous organizational learning. Public
organizations aren’t they citizens’ agents and accountability does not help to develop the
underlying culture to that agent concept?
What is the value of the accountability practice of contemporary public organizations? First,
conceptually and operationally, we need to identify the scope, the size and the mechanisms
of accountability of the authorities. What does accountability mean? It involves both formal
commitments and implicit expectations: what are they? Do they manifest themselves in the
expected form or only on expected results? Can we follow the implementation by identifying
the inputs, the actions, the outputs, the outcomes, the effects and the impacts? What is
the value of the report: its nature, its objects, its recipients and the follow ups it engages?
Accountability often manifests itself in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand politicians as
well as senior managers show little enthusiasm to publicly commit on specific targets to be
met. On the other hand, the media and political opponents rise in operational performance
and results reporting difficulties. Accountability has it intended to make citizens ever more
cynical about public management?
Accountability faces several challenges, including the conceptual and technological capacity,
multiplication of operations and costly time interactions, energies, conflicts and budgets, as
well as the artificiality of the reported data (Potemkin syndrome) . Can it be otherwise?
To address these issues, the IIAS Congress welcomes contributions on three subthemes.
First, it matters organizing an effective sharing of roles and responsibilities between levels
of government, kinds of public organizations, and between the public, the private and the
non-profit sector more generally. Second, it matters rethinking accountability mechanisms
to cope with the fragmentation of responsibilities. Finally, the actors ultimately involved in
service delivery, and particularly at local government levels, need to have the necessary
capacity to fulfil their share of responsibilities and related accountability requirement; with
human capital playing a determinant role in capacity-building.
Sub-theme 1 :
Proliferation of Responsible Actors in Public Administration: competition, sharing
of roles and responsibilities and cooperation among actors
Sub-theme 2 :
Rethinking Accountability in Times of Proliferation of Public Actors: content and
effective systems for accountability
Sub-theme 3 :
Capacity-building in the Times of Changes and Decentralization: organization
and human capital development at national, subnational and local government
levels