Analysing and Assessing Accountability: A Conceptual Framework
Bovens's narrow, sociological definition of accountability, written to save a concept he calls golden but elusive: as an icon of good governance it has come to resemble a dustbin filled with good intentions. Rather than an evaluative umbrella for transparency, responsiveness and the like, he defines it as a social relation between an actor and a forum, in which the actor is obliged to explain and justify their conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgement, and the actor may face consequences. The possibility of sanctions, not their imposition, separates being held to account from non-committal provision of information, and he prefers the somewhat more neutral word consequences, partly because sanction biases towards negative scrutiny when many forums judge positively and even reward. On this definition transparency is not yet accountability, since it need not involve scrutiny by a specific forum, and nor is participation, since accountability as he defines it is retrospective.
It then classifies accountability relations on four separate dimensions: the forum (political, legal, administrative, professional, social and possibly more, not infrequently leaving public bodies with the problem of many eyes); the actor (corporate, hierarchical, collective or individual, strategies forums use against the problem of many hands); the conduct (financial, procedural, product); and the obligation (vertical, diagonal, horizontal). It offers three evaluative perspectives, democratic, constitutional and learning, concerned with democratic control, preventing the abuse of power and learning, which need not point the same way: too much emphasis on corruption control, beneficial from the constitutional view, could produce a proceduralism that hampers reflexivity.
The bridge to psychological safety is ours. For Bovens, judgement and consequences are possibilities within a relation of giving and questioning an account, and his learning perspective treats accountability, backed by the possibility of sanctions, as feedback that forces those held to account to reflect; we read the gap between this and accountability used as blame as the territory psychological safety works in. Its limits: it is conceptual rather than empirical, written for public institutions and EU governance, and Bovens concedes that judging whether accountability is adequate depends on a prior view of what governance should be.
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