Date: Wednesday 1st May 2019

Venue: Room EBS.2.1 - Essex Business School

Time: 09.00am - 1.00pm

On Behalf of the Centre for Accountability and Global Development (CAGD)

Essex Business School, University of Essex.

You are warmly invited to join us in this workshop;

Three decades of New Public Management reforms have reinvented both the scope and quality of accountability across public sector entities, while there has also been increased attention to accountability in the third sector. Public administrators and voluntary sector leaders are especially under pressure as they are required to act as mangers and discharge accountability both upwards to higher-level parties and downwards to citizens or beneficiaries; with an emphasis on results and outputs from resources entrusted to them. Conflicts, tensions and resistance are not surprising when organisational leaders are confronted to multiple, and somewhat diverging, expectations and dimensions of accountability. A search for a new means of discharging accountability has instigated in the public sector focusing particularly on individuals and their learning aspects. The learning dimension of accountability is also connected to the articulation of pluralistic (deliberate) democracy given that it offers public administrators with the mechanisms to obtain information about their own functioning and improve performance by reflecting on the achievements and challenges of their past activities. In the third sector, concerns about how donated funds are spent and the social impact of projects have taken centre stage, albeit that basic mechanisms of financial accountability remain limited in some emerging economies.

The workshop thus has a particular focus on such emerging forms of accountability relationships within public and third sector entities of emerging economies. Four papers have been selected for presentation in the workshop discussing various accounting, budgeting and other management control measures introduced to public or third sector entities and the emergence of new forms of accountability in emerging economy contexts.

New Means of Accountability in the Public and Third Sector