Public Accountability
Designs, Dilemmas and Experiences

The most comprehensive survey to-date of how different organizations hold persons acting in the public interest to account.

Michael W. Dowdle (Edited by)

9780521617611, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 6 July 2006

474 pages, 9 b/w illus. 1 table
22.9 x 15.3 x 2.8 cm, 0.763 kg

"Dowdle has amassed an all-star cast of established and ascendant scholars in the areas of public law and administrative law whose essays approach the topic from a variety of angles. Indeed, one could not imagine a better list of contributors for this topic. This makes reading the collection a pure treat offering something for every intellectual palette." - The Law and Politics Book Review Ariel Meyerstein, University of California-Berkeley

There is an ongoing perception that public accountability in modern-day governance is in 'crisis', caused by globalization and the increasing power of private economic interests. This book responds to that idea, providing the most comprehensive survey to date of how different organizations hold persons acting in the public interest to account, and the various problems they face. The book shows how key issues, such as public-mindedness, democracy and responsibility, and structures, such as bureaucracy, markets and transparency, adopt radically different and sometimes contradictory interpretations when viewed from different experiential perspectives. It also demonstrates how underlying all this are core communities of experiences that bind these diverse interpretations and perspectives into a complex web of mutual interaction and influence. The book includes studies not only of Anglo-American experiences, but also of the experiences of foreign and transnational organizations: NGOs, transnational resistance movements, the Indonesian labor movement, and the Chinese Parliament.

Introduction: accountability and method: 1. Public accountability: conceptual, historical and epistemic mappings Michael W. Dowdle
Part I. Accountability and the State: 2. Accountability and responsibility through restorative justice John Braithwaite
3. The myth of non-bureaucratic accountability and the anti-administrative impulse Edward Rubin
4. Extending public accountability through privatization from public law to publicization Jody Freeman
Part II. Accountability and Design: 5. Accountability and institutional design: some thoughts on the grammar of governance Jerry L. Mashaw
6. Emerging labor movements and the accountability dilemma: the case of Indonesia Michele Ford
7. Spontaneous accountability Colin Scott
Part III. Accountability and Participation: 8. Accounting for accountability in neoliberal regulatory regimes Christine Harrington and Z. Umut Turem
9. The mark of responsibility (with a postscript on accountability) John Gardner
10. Technocratic vs. convivial accountability Bronwen Morgan
Part IV. Accountability and Experience: 11. Understanding NGO-based social and environmental regulatory systems: why we need new models of accountability Sasha Courville
12. Problem-solving courts and the judicial accountability deficit Michael Dorf
13. Public accountability in ailen terrain: exploring for constitutional accountability in the People's Republic of China Michael Dowdle.

Subject Areas: Constitutional & administrative law [LND], Jurisprudence & philosophy of law [LAB], Political science & theory [JPA], Sociology & anthropology [JH], Social & political philosophy [HPS]