Accountability is a concept in ethics with several meanings. It is often used synonymously with such concepts as answerability, enforcement, responsibility, blameworthiness, liability and other terms associated with the expectation of account-giving. As an aspect of governance, it has been central to discussions related to problems in both the public and private (corporation) worlds.

Accountability is defined as "A is accountable to B when A is obliged to inform B about A’s (past or future) actions and decisions, to justify them, and to suffer punishment in the case of eventual misconduct" .

In leadership roles, accountability is the acknowledgment and assumption of responsibility for actions, products, decisions, and policies including the administration, governance and implementation within the scope of the role or employment position and encompassing the obligation to report, explain and be answerable for resulting consequences.

History

"Accountability" stems from late Latin accomptare (to account), a prefixed form of computare (to calculate), which in turn derived from putare (to reckon). The word is an extension of the terminology used in the money lending systems that first developed in Ancient Greece and later, Rome. One would borrow money from a money lender, be that a local Temple or Merchant, and would then be held responsible to their account with that party. Responsibility is also a close synonym. Perhaps the first written statement of accountability is in the Code of Hammurabi, where Hammurabi describes certain undesirable actions and their consequences. One example:

"If a man uses violence on another man's wife to sleep with her, the man shall be killed, but the wife shall be blameless."

Other early examples can be found in the Bible

Types of accountability

Bruce Stone, O.P. Dwivedi, and Joseph G. Jabbra list 8 types of accountability, namely: moral, administrative, political, managerial, market, legal/judicial, constituency relation, and professional.

Political accountability

Political accountability is the accountability of the government, civil servants and politicians to the public and to legislative bodies such as congress or parliament.

Elections are a direct way of holding politicians accountable to the public. In the lead up to an election, candidates and parties must campaign, explaining their position on matters of public interest. The electorate can also vote on a candidate's past record if he or she is seeking re-election. In some cases - for example the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia in Canada - voters also have the right to petition for a recall election between normal elections.

Generally, however, voters do not have any direct way of holding elected representatives to account during the term for which they have been elected. Additionally, some officials and legislators may be appointed rather than elected. Constitution, or statute, can empower a legislative body to hold their own members, the government, and government bodies to account. This can be through holding an internal or independent inquiry. Inquiries are usually held in response to an allegation of misconduct or corruption. The powers, procedures and sanctions vary from country to country. The legislature may have the power to impeach the individual, remove them, or suspend them from office for a period of time. The accused person might also decide to resign before trial. Impeachment in the United States has been used both for elected representatives and other civil offices, such as district court judges.

In parliamentary systems, the government relies on the support or parliament, which gives parliament power to hold the government to account. For example, some parliaments can motion for a vote of no confidence in the government.

Administrative accountability

Internal rules and norms as well as some independent commission are mechanisms to hold civil servant within the administration of government accountable. Within department or ministry, firstly, behavior is bounded by rules and regulations; secondly, civil servants are subordinates in a hierarchy and accountable to superiors. Nonetheless, there are independent “watchdog” units to scrutinize and hold departments accountable; legitimacy of these commissions is built upon their independence, as it avoids any conflicts of interest. Apart from internal checks, some “watchdog” units accept complaints from citizens, bridging government and society to hold civil servants accountable to citizens, but not merely governmental departments.

Market accountability

Under voices for decentralization and privatization of the government, services provided are nowadays more “customer-driven” and should aim to provide convenience and various choices to citizens; with this perspective, there are comparisons and competition between public and private services and this, ideally, improves quality of service. As mentioned by Bruce Stone, the standard of assessment for accountability is therefore “responsiveness of service providers to a body of ‘sovereign’ customers and produce quality service. Outsourcing service is one means to adopt market accountability. Government can choose among a shortlist of companies for outsourced service; within the contracting period, government can hold the company by rewriting contracts or by choosing another company.

Constituency relations

Within this perspective, a particular agency or the government is accountable if voices from agencies, groups or institutions, which is outside the public sector and representing citizens’ interests in a particular constituency or field, are heard. Moreover, the government is obliged to empower members of agencies with political rights to run for elections and be elected; or, appoint them into the public sector as a way to hold the government representative and ensure voices from all constituencies are included in policy-making process.

Public/private overlap

With the increase over the last several decades in public service provision by private entities, especially in Britain and the United States, some have called for increased political accountability mechanisms to be applied to otherwise non-political entities. Legal scholar Anne Davies, for instance, argues that the line between public institutions and private entities like corporations is becoming blurred in certain areas of public service provision in the United Kingdom and that this can compromise political accountability in those areas. She and others argue that some administrative law reforms are necessary to address this accountability gap.

With respect to the public/private overlap in the United States, public concern over the contracting out of government (including military) services and the resulting accountability gap has been highlighted recently following the shooting incident involving the Blackwater security firm in Iraq.

It has been argued that in Canada the dominant bank industry players, in performing vital economic roles like lending to the government and managing the money and credit supply, are performing public and sometimes political functions without corresponding public and political accountability.

Social implications

Accountability constrains the extent to which elected representatives and other office-holders can willfully deviate from their theoretical responsibilities, thus reducing corruption. The relationship of the concept of accountability to related concepts like the rule of law or democracy, however, still awaits further elucidation.

In a BBC documentary, the Misrepresentation of the People Act was proposed to make members of parliament in the UK more accountable.

Contemporary evolution

Accountability involves either the expectation or assumption of account-giving behavior. The study of account giving as a sociological act was recently articulated in a 1968 article on "Accounts" by Marvin Scott and Stanford Lyman and Stephen Soroka , although it can be traced as well to J.L. Austin's 1956 essay "A Plea for Excuses," in which he used excuse-making as an example of speech acts.

Communications scholars have extended this work through the examination of strategic uses of excuses, justifications, rationalizations, apologies and other forms of account giving behavior by individuals and corporations, and Philip Tetlock and his colleagues have applied experimental design techniques to explore how individuals behave under various scenarios and situations that demand accountability.

Recently, accountability has become an important topic in the discussion about the legitimacy of international institutions. Because there is no global democracy to which organizations must account, global administrative bodies are often criticized as having large accountability gaps. One paradigmatic problem arising in the global context is that of institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF who are founded and supported by wealthy nations and provide aid, in the form of grants and loans, to developing nations. Should those institutions be accountable to their founders and investors or to the persons and nations they help? In the debate over global justice and its distributional consequences, Cosmopolitans tend to advocate greater accountability to the disregarded interests of traditionally marginalized populations and developing nations. On the other hand, those in the Nationalism and Society of States traditions deny the tenets of moral universalism and argue that beneficiaries of global development initiatives have no substantive entitlement to call international institutions to account.

Accountability is becoming an increasingly important issue for the non-profit world. Several NGOs signed the "accountability charter" in 2005. In the Humanitarian field, initiatives such as the HAPI (Humanitarian Accountability Partnership International) appeared. Individual NGOs have set their own accountability systems (for example, the ALPS, Accountability, Learning and Planning System of ActionAid)

See also

• Campaign finance reform
• Committee on Standards in Public Life
• Freedom of information legislation
• Government Accountability Office
• Transparency International
• Worldwide Governance Indicators
• Sterling Harwood, "Accountability," in John K. Roth, ed., Ethics: Ready Reference (Salem Press, 1994), reprinted in Sterling Harwood, ed., Business as Ethical and Business as Usual (Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1996).

References

AccountAbility, also known as the Institute of Social and Ethical Accountability, is an independent not-for-profit think-tank and global network promoting accountability sustainable business practices and corporate responsibility.

Organisation and Role

AccountAbility was established in London, United Kingdom in 1996 with the stated aim to “develop new tools, thinking and connections that enable individuals, institutions and alliances to respond better to global challenges” . AccountAbility's work is closely related but not limited to the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) field. The organisation is often labelled as a global think-tank, and has undertaken work in the areas of Responsible Competitiveness, Partnership Effectiveness, Collaborative Governance and Sustainability Assurance and Reporting.

AccountAbility’s members include businesses, NGOs and research bodies, who elect the international, multi-stakeholder Council, with representatives from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, spanning the business, non-profit, consultancies and academia sectors.

AccountAbility’s Chief Executive, Simon Zadek is also a Senior Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and is a member of the Clinton-Dalberg Task Force programme effectiveness in leveraging private enterprise for development. In 2003, he was named the World Economic Forum’s ‘Global Leaders for Tomorrow.'

AA1000 Series of Standards

At the core of AccountAbility's work is the AA1000 Series, a series of recognised corporate responsibility standards, which is an open source framework for organisational accountability developed through a multi-stakeholder consultation and review process. The standards are designed to be compatible with other key standards in this area, including the GRI Guidelines, SIGMA Guidelines , SA8000, the ISO Series and financial accounting standards.

The AA1000 Series consists of: the AA1000 Framework, the AA1000 Assurance Standard (AA1000AS) and AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard (AA100SES).

AA1000 Framework

The AA1000 Framework, launched in 1999, aimes to support organisational learning and progress towards sustainable development by improving the quality of social and ethical accounting, auditing and reporting. It was positioned as a foundation standard which could underpin the development of more specialist standards and accelerate convergence of standards for organisational accountability.

AA1000 Assurance Standard

The AA1000 Assurance Standard, launched in 2003, aimed to provide a systematic and consistent framework for assurance of performance. The AA1000AS is positioned as the first non-proprietary, open-source Assurance Standard that covers the full range of an organisation's disclosure and performance.

The standard assesses reports against three main principles: materiality, completeness and responsiveness.

Sustainability Reporting and Assurance Standards, like AA1000AS, are responding to increasing business demands for credible, fair and balanced information on organisations’ management and understanding of non-financial issues. Increasing use of the standard worldwide (Japan, Australia, Brazil, South Africa and India) have caused high interest in the AA1000AS revision, coming from sustainability practitioners, organisations preparing reports and from other standards bodies.

The AA1000AS is currently undergoing a revision process with the second edition of AA1000AS being the world's first corporate standard to be developed using a web-based, co-development, open-source 'wiki' techniques to maximise participation and leverage synergies of collective knowledge. The wiki revision of the standard was launched on 24 January 2008 and will continue until the end of October 2008.

AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard

The AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard, launched in 2005, aims to secure the quality of organisations' engagement with their stakeholders in the context of learning, governance and accountability. The AA1000SES can be used as a stand-alone standard or in combination with other standards (e.g. AA1000 Assurance Standard, Global Reporting Initiative, ISO).

Responsible Competitiveness

The term responsible competitiveness stands for markets that reward business practices that deliver improved social, environmental and economic outcomes. Responsible competitiveness also means economic success for nations that encourage such business practices through public policies, societal norms and citizen actions.

AccountAbility works with regional and national governments, and with multi-sector alliances to help reshape markets. Some of the partners of the Responsible Competitiveness work are Fundação Dom Cabral, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, London Development Agency, Authentix, Microsoft, UNEP, BT, FUNDEMAS, Yorkshire Forward and SAGIA. The goal of this work is to build social and environmental innovation into the core of competitiveness strategies.

The Responsible Competitiveness Series of AccountAbility include the reports:

• 'Responsible Competitiveness: Corporate Responsibility Clusters in Action'
• 'Corporate Responsibility and the Competitive Advantage of Nations'
• 'Trading Accountability: Business, Trade and Investment Policy and Sustainable Development'
• 'Responsible Competitiveness Index 2003: Aligning corporate responsibility and the competitiveness of nations'
• 'Responsible Competitiveness: Reshaping Markets Through Responsible Business Practices'
• 'Responsible Competitiveness in Europe: Enhancing European Competitiveness through Corporate Responsibility'
• 'The State of Responsible Competitiveness 2007: Making Sustainability Count in Global Markets'

The State of Responsible Competitiveness 2007

The State of Responsible Competitiveness 2007: Making Sustainability Count in Global Markets is a report on countries’ efforts to become more competitive through enhancing responsible business practices. The report suggests what each country can do to perform better in global trade and pinpoints the winners in the competition for implementing more responsible business practices.

According to The Responsible Competitiveness Index, covering 108 countries accounting for 96% of global economic activity, Sweden is the world's most responsibly competitive nation, followed by Denmark, Finland, Iceland and UK. Strong performers outside Europe include Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Japan, Estonia, Slovenia, Chile and the Republic of Korea.

The report includes a foreword from Al Gore and a dozen essays on responsible competitiveness from experts such as Sir Nicholas Stern (climate change), Laura Tyson (the gender gap), Jean-Philippe Courtois (ICT, social inclusion and competitiveness), Nick Butler (energy security), Peter Eigen (corruption) and Jonathan Lash (preparing for a carbon-constrained future).

AccountAbility Rating

The Accountability Rating is a tool for measuring the extent to which companies have embedded responsible practices into the way they do business. The Rating was developed by CSR consultancy csrnetwork and AccountAbility and first applied in 2004.

Every year AccountAbility applies the Rating to the world’s largest companies (according to the Fortune Global 100, or ‘G100’), and the headline results are first published by Fortune magazine, followed by other media.

The Rating evaluates companies according to their public reporting, as well as data on their actual social and environmental performance. It rates companies on four key areas: strategy, governance, engagement and impact. Their scores are out of a maximum of 100.

Country ratings

AccountAbility also publishes country rankings. In 2007, alongside the global application of the Accountability Rating to the world’s largest 100 companies, the Accountability Rating was applied to the largest companies in five countries: Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Greece and South Africa.

References

See also

• Alex MacGillivray
• Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
• Global Reporting Initiative
• Simon Zadek
• Social accounting
• Sustainability
• Transparency International

External links

• Official Site
• AA1000AS Register See which companies are currently using the AA1000AS