Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

250 Public Management and Administration
Specifically, this means senior management is not necessarily held accountable for an
isolated instance of wrongdoing or poor service by a subordinate, but senior management
would be held accountable if this were systemic, and especially if senior management did
not take adequate preventative action. Once accountability is clarified along these lines,
it should be possible to reconcile the need for proper accountability with devolution of
responsibility.
In this way senior managers would be accountable, but not unfairly or unreasonably.
This is a more realistic form of accountability in that the most senior
person in the organization with the actual carriage of a task is the accountable
person. It is unlike the traditional model where accountability only occurs at
the top.
A third form of accountability is that of retrospective accountability. The traditional
model always had some retrospective mechanisms, particularly for
financial probity, and Behn argues it should be possible to establish retrospective
accountability for performance (Behn, 2001, p. 105):
It seems straightforward to adapt the existing, retrospective mechanisms for establishing
democratic accountability for finances and equity to the new needs of creating a retrospective
mechanism for establishing democratic accountability for performance. Trust but verify.
Behn’s notion of trust deserves wider consideration. Trust is required of a manager,
in that he or she is given a task to do and is then left to do it, without
detailed oversight. If later there is verification that the work has been done, that
in no way takes away the sense of trust given to the manager in the first place.
The alternative, as was seen in an administrative system, is to build up rules,
manuals and procedures so that administrators merely follow these through in
a machine-like fashion.
Fukuyama draws a distinction between those who operate according to rules
and professionals, where ‘the concept of a professional serves as a prototype of
a high-trust, relatively unregulated occupation’ (Fukuyama, 1995, p. 223):
Past a certain point, the proliferation of rules to regulate wider and wider sets of social
relationships becomes not the hallmark of rational efficiency but a sign of social dysfunction.
There is usually an inverse relationship between rules and trust: the more people
depend on rules to regulate their interactions, the less they trust each other, and vice versa.
For public management to be regarded as a profession there needs to be more
trust and fewer detailed rules. Managers should be allowed to achieve their
goals, but, for accountability reasons, there still needs to be verification – trust
but verify. The increased use of evaluation of programmes, of formal inquiries,
assists this requirement for accountability. Public managers will be trusted to
achieve results and to take formal responsibility for doing so, but the achievement
of results will face verification.
It is even possible for accountability to be enhanced by the public management
reforms. Both organizationally and personally, accountability may be