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Accountability Mechanisms (accountability + mechanism)
Selected AbstractsAN EXAMINATION OF THE CONTENT OF COMMUNITY FINANCIAL REPORTS IN QUEENSLAND LOCAL GOVERNMENT AUTHORITIESFINANCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY & MANAGEMENT, Issue 4 2008Trevor Stanley Annual reports, including general purpose financial statements, have been adopted as a key mechanism by which public sector entities discharge their accountability. However, there is concern about the complexity of public sector general purpose financial statements and consequently their effectiveness as an accountability mechanism. In Australia, the Queensland government has moved to address this issue in local government authorities by introducing a Community Financial Report as a means of simplifying the financial statements. A feature of this initiative was the lack of prescription given to local government authorities in the preparation of this report. This paper examines the form and content included in Community Financial Reports and also uses a disclosure index to determine the level of disclosure in the reports. The results of this research show that the form and content of the Community Financial Reports varied considerably. There was no definitive style, with each report being unique. The disclosure index revealed low levels of disclosure by local government authorities in the first year of the report as well as a lack of analysis of the Statements of Financial Performance, Position and Cash Flows. As well, there was a significant difference in the disclosures made by rural local government authorities compared with urban local government authorities. The results of this research will be of interest to local government authorities and local government regulators as they aim to provide useful, understandable information for stakeholders. [source] Accountability Disclosures by Queensland Local Government Councils: 1997,1999FINANCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY & MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2002Christine Ryan The annual report is promoted and regarded as the primary medium of accountability for government agencies. In Australia, anecdotal evidence suggests the quality of annual reports is variable. However, there is scant empirical evidence on the quality of reports. The aim of this research is to gauge the quality of annual reporting by local governments in Queensland, and to investigate the factors that may contribute to that level of quality. The results of the study indicate that although the quality of reporting by local governments has improved over time, councils generally do not report information on aspects of corporate governance, remuneration of executive staff, personnel, occupational health and safety, equal opportunity policies, and performance information. In addition, the results indicate there is a correlation between the size of the local government and the quality of reporting but the quality of disclosures is not correlated with the timeliness of reports. The study will be of interest to the accounting profession, public sector regulators who are responsible for the integrity of the accountability mechanisms and public sector accounting practitioners. It will form the basis for future longitudinal research, which will map changes in the quality of local government annual reporting. [source] Civil Society and Democratically Accountable Global GovernanceGOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 2 2004Jan Aart Scholte This article explores the ways and extents that civil society associations can bring greater public accountability to global governance. The analysis first reviews the growth of civil society engagement of global governance. Second, the article elaborates four general ways that civil society associations have promoted increased accountability in global governance: by increasing the public transparency of global governance operations; by monitoring and reviewing global policies; by seeking redress for mistakes and harms attributable to global regulatory bodies; and by advancing the creation of formal accountability mechanisms for global governance. Third, the article identifies six broad circumstances that have affected (and often limited) the extent of civil society achievements with respect to accountability in global governance. [source] The External Pressures on the Internal Governance of UniversitiesHIGHER EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2002Brian Salter Governance is a means for realising institutional goals and in an ideal world should enable the institution to respond to the demands of the political environment by regulating its internal affairs accordingly. In the case of universities, not only is that environment increasingly differentiated but so also is the ability of universities to access it. Changes in state funding arrangements, accountability mechanisms, the contribution of the private sector, and the public definition of university education have placed numerous and varied pressures on institutions. Yet there is a studied reluctance by institutions to accept that their ability to respond to these pressures is equally variable, that they should tailor their ambitions to their capacities, and that their internal governance should be adapted using the principle of fitness for purpose. In the main, this is because the dominant ideological themes of higher education do not support the idea of distinct university functions of equal status. Rather, they encourage the erroneous belief that all universities are homogeneous in their functions , or, at least, that all have the potential to be homogeneous. [source] Accountability in the Regulatory StateJOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 1 2000Colin Scott Accountability has long been both a key theme and a key problem in constitutional scholarship. The centrality of the accountability debates in contemporary political and legal discourse is a product of the difficulty of balancing the autonomy given to those exercising public power with appropriate control. The traditional mechanisms of accountability to Parliament and to the courts are problematic because in a complex administrative state, characterized by widespread delegation of discretion to actors located far from the centre of government, the conception of centralized responsibility upon which traditional accountability mechanisms are based is often fictional. The problems of accountability have been made manifest by the transformations wrought on public administration by the new public management (NPM) revolution which have further fragmented the public sector. In this article it is argued that if public lawyers are to be reconciled to these changes then it will be through recognizing the potential for additional or extended mechanisms of accountability in supplementing or displacing traditional accountability functions. The article identifies and develops two such extended accountability models: interdependence and redundancy [source] Self-Restraint in Search of Legitimacy: The Reform of the Argentine Supreme CourtLATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2009Alba M. Ruibal ABSTRACT In 2003, the Argentine executive promoted a process of Supreme Court reform that entailed limiting presidential attributions in the selection of justices. Then the renewed court implemented changes to its internal procedures that increased its own accountability mechanisms. The literature on the politics of institutional judicial independence in Latin America has developed two explanatory models: one presents reforms as an insurance policy, the other as a consequence of divided government. Both perspectives conceive of reforms as a result of political competition and as a way to limit other actors, the future government in the first case, the party in power in the second. This study, by contrast, explains the Argentine reforms as movements of strategic self-restriction, designed to build legitimacy and credibility, for the government and the court, respectively, in a context of social and institutional crisis and pressure from civil society. [source] Decentralization in Kerala: Panchayat government discretion and accountability,PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION & DEVELOPMENT, Issue 4 2009Varsha Venugopal Kerala is regarded as one of the most decentralized states in India. Through a ,big bang' approach, Kerala implemented a significant fiscal decentralization program and then built the capacity of its local governments. We employ a diagnostic framework to analyze its local government discretion and accountability in political, administrative and fiscal domains. We find that Kerala's local governments have a very high degree of discretionary power accompanied by a high degree of accountability towards citizens. But the areas of administrative accountability and financial management need to be strengthened. Also there may have been excessive focus and investment on social accountability mechanisms at the cost of local government discretion and formal public sector accountability mechanisms. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Dynamics of NGO legitimacy: how organising betrays core missions of INGOsPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION & DEVELOPMENT, Issue 1 2008Ringo Ossewaarde Abstract International non-governmental organisations (INGOs) are prominent actors in the international arena, aiming to improve the life of disadvantaged people. However, INGOs often do not succeed in doing this. Consequently, INGO legitimacy is regularly questioned. Increased transparency and tightened accountability mechanisms are often-mentioned solutions to this problem. Based on an analysis of four dimensions of INGO legitimacy,normative, regulatory, cognitive and output legitimacy,we argue that this is not necessarily adequate. We conclude that INGO mission statements create a normative source of legitimacy, but that this, in itself, is not enough to ground INGO legitimacy: it also needs to be institutionalised and organised. However, as a result of power relations and resulting pressures for accountability and transparency, as defined by their external stakeholders, INGOs experience a permanent struggle to reconcile their mission with the requirements for regulatory, cognitive and output legitimacy. The more these stakeholders press for increased organisation of INGO work, the more the pursuit of the core objectives of INGOs is obstructed. We illustrate this argument with the case of the post-Tsunami humanitarian intervention (2004/2005). Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] | ||||||||||