Traditional Public Accountability

Traditionally public accountability has been achieved through mechanisms of control. Light (1998) claims that public accountability has long been narrowly defined as “limit[ing] bureaucratic discretion through compliance with tightly drawn rules and regulations” (12). Since public managers are not elected by the people, it is up to elected representatives (such as legislatures and chief executives) to ensure that public managers serve the needs of the people. Lynn (2006) identifies the root challenge of government accountability as “the delegation of sovereign authority to [nonelected] officials empowered to act in the name of the people and their representatives and the resulting necessity to maintain control over those officials’ actions” (137).

From a more practical view of the public manager, however, public accountability means “addressing the public’s expectations for government performance” (Posner 2002, 547). The key question is whether the government is accomplishing what citizens expect it to accomplish. Of course, that question is about more than just implementation. The reasonableness of a policy and its goals, the resources allotted to support it, the authority to take appropriate program actions, and the capacity and know-how to design and carry out the necessary steps all have a bearing on addressing the accountability question successfully. Yet at the end of the day, public accountability is a bottom-line issue: Did government successfully complete the job in a manner consistent with the public interest? Since the answer has political consequences, such a perspective compels public managers to use whatever administrative mechanisms are available to achieve a positive answer to that question.

Dimensions of Public Accountability Control

Public sector employees are called on to serve many (and sometimes conflicting) stakeholder interests through informal and formal control mechanisms (Romzek and Dubnick 1994). Informally, public managers report “not only to a multitude of elected officials, but also to a plethora of interest groups, clientele, media, and other actors” (Posner 2002, 524). Formally, mechanisms of control have evolved to address different dimensions of public accountability. Dicke and Ott (1999) identified three of them: accountability to other governmental bodies, hierarchical accountability, and accountability to impersonal standards. The result is that public agencies are asked to conform simultaneously to several legitimate but often competing accountability expectations.

The very division of power among executive, legislative, and judicial branches is one formalized approach to limiting the discretion of public managers and promoting accountability. Reforms enacted during the Progressive era in the United States also led to the establishment of independent government regulatory agencies, public commissions, and public corporations to oversee government bodies through the executive branch. Congress has a role in agency oversight through their authorizing and appropriation committees, public hearings, and indirectly through the semiautonomous US Government Accountability Office (GAO). The judicial branch also has a role in agency oversight by placing a check on the “arbitrary and capricious” behavior of agencies and their officials.

A second formal approach to accountability for public actions is advanced through vertical chains of authority within government. Echoing the views of Max Weber, Woodrow Wilson (1887) placed vertical reporting relationships at the center of his call for a separation of politics from administration. The concept purports that intraorganizational controls enhance adherence to the public interest by holding bureaucrats to the account of “higher authorities including elected and appointed officials who sit at the apex of institutional chains of command” (Kearns 1996, 11).

Finally, impersonal standards of performance also have emerged as a formal method for monitoring public managers. Freidrich’s (1940) call for increased attention to technical standards provided the groundwork for much of the attention we see toward performance management in government today. Performance measures increase accountability to the public, and they encourage and codify shared commitments and responsibilities (Kettl 2005). In addition, Congress and many state legislatures have created procedural standards and safeguards to enforce bureaucratic accountability through such legislation as the federal Administrative Procedures Act (1946), which specifies processes through which government officials take certain actions.

The combination of these various control factors makes accountability anything but straightforward for public managers. The result is an “overlapping set of independent and competing mechanisms—and a variety of independently operating accountability holders” (Behn 2001, 60). Public managers working with CSCs are thus positioned within an existing set of complicated and often competing accountability mechanisms. Defining public accountability for CSCs not only demands attention to these existing constraints, but also requires new approaches to create mutual accountability and ensure democratic accountability.

Dimensions of Democratic Accountability

The central tension of democratic accountability is the question of how to ensure that the administrative arms of government implement policies and programs that are in line with the public interest. The issue revolves around the inherent challenge of government bureaucracy within a democracy and the extent to which unelected officials in administrative agencies carry out their duties in a manner that matches the public’s expectations as expressed through their elected officials. Much of the foundational work on democratic accountability revolves around the question of the influence that bureaucratic agents have in policy outcomes through the process of implementation. There are a variety of views on that topic, including those who want to hold administrators accountable for specific goals and those who take a pragmatic view that dissolves the distinction between ends and means (Harmon 1995).

The seminal works by Dwight Waldo inform our understanding of democratic accountability and its importance to CSCs. Waldo’s The Administrative State (1948) sets out a conceptual foundation for understanding the role of government managers in interpreting and shaping the policies they implement. He challenges the notion that policy direction alone can guide bureaucratic outcomes and claims that “any simple division of government into politics-and-administration is inadequate” (148). The drawback of the adoption of that simple dichotomy is the subsequent removal of the ideals of democracy from the discourse on public administration. Management within the public sector is more than simply accomplishing objectives; it also is about the active work of determining those objectives. He challenges Woodrow Wilson and others’ suggestion that democracy “could only apply to the deciding phase of the two-fold governmental process.” Instead, Waldo argues that democracy is a relevant value in the administration of those decisions.

Waldo’s book provides an important contribution to our understanding of what makes management in government different from that in the private sector or nonprofit organizations. The very democratic nature of our government, and the underlying assumption that citizens have a voice in how it operates, permeates not only our electoral processes, but also our method of implementing government programs. His writings also remind us of the important influence that unelected agency leaders have in interpreting and shaping the nature of public policy.

O. C. McSwite’s book, Legitimacy in Public Administration: A Discourse Analysis (1997), explains why accountability is particularly important to a democracy.¹ McSwite provides more evidence of why we need to take particular care in evaluating the work of government agencies. McSwite presents the term legitimacy (the government’s appropriate representation of the public’s goals) and relates it to the authority of government to carry out the public’s will in a democracy. Rather than trying to solve the legitimacy question, McSwite asks “how administration fits within the scheme of American democratic government” (11).

McSwite claims that the founding fathers recognized that citizens would inevitably have different interests on policy issues and that the democratic form of government would have to accommodate different preferences in the construction of national policy. Madison’s The Federalist Number 10 articulates this view of American federalism by arguing that in a country as large as the territory of the United States, direct democracy (or direct citizen input on policy decisions) is incompatible with national government (Hamilton, Jay, and Madison 2001). Instead, The Federalist authors recommended popularly elected representatives. The nature of their electoral responsibilities to diverse constituents would force elected officials to consider diverse citizen interests in policymaking.

McSwite, whose sympathy lies with the Anti-Federalists, suggests that the problem with relying solely on the legislative process to set the standards of government accountability is that it ignores the influence that administrators have in determining policy outcomes. He points out that determining the legitimacy of any given activity of the bureaucracy is not always clear; rather, it needs to be worked out among a group of interested parties in an ongoing dialogue or relationship. It is the same dynamic that is called for in CSC. Each of the parties to a collaboration may come in with individual “goals”; however, the interaction among the parties will determine the specific course of action, and the initial course may evolve during the collaboration. McSwite validates the concept that the activities of public administrators are potentially legitimate when they are contested and negotiated by public managers on behalf of the public they serve through collaborative interactions, as often occurs in CSC.

Robert Behn’s contribution to our understanding of democratic accountability involves his attention to the varying institutional mechanisms that hold administrative behavior to account and complement legislative oversight. In Rethinking Democratic Accountability (2001), he highlights the historical influences that shaped the institutions and mechanisms designed to ensure that the public interest is not distorted through the process of implementation. He suggests that “our American concept of democratic accountability evolved from Madison’s separation of powers to Wilson’s separation of administration from policies, with Taylor and Weber justifying that separation by describing how an independent administrative apparatus could be both efficient and accountable” (58). He also points out the varied and at times layered pressures on bureaucratic behavior that are inherent in a system of government developed around the notion of separation of powers. He explains, “Our current system of democratic accountability is neither orderly, nor hierarchal, nor coherent” (60).

Behn presents a new concept of democratic accountability, suggesting that it must be a “compact of mutual, collective responsibility” (2001). The concept implies an ethos within administration that involves (1) a compact, or ethical commitment; (2) responsibility, or a willingness to accept constraints on administrative behavior for the public good; (3) mutual commitment to rules as a sense of duty to others; and (4) a collective duty to avoid narrowing in on scapegoats when things go wrong and to take responsibility as a team for all outcomes. This shift in attitude can create a more collective approach to accountability whereby public administrators consider the impacts of their actions (and other cross-sector collaborators) on the populations they serve within the constraints of the existing system.

In an environment of increasing involvement of nonstate organizations in the delivery of public programs, the question is how to ensure the public interest is served through CSCs. In addressing democratic accountability, it is important to consider the processes by which the public’s expectations are defined, as well as concrete techniques for dialogue with citizens affected by any given program.

In Public Values and Public Interest: Counterbalancing Economic Individualism (2007), Barry Bozeman presents a standard by which CSCs could hold each other to account. For Bozeman, the public interest “refers to those outcomes best serving the long-run survival and well-being of a social collective construed as a public” (17). He addresses the challenge of identifying what exactly is the “public interest” for a given constituency, arguing that creating an understanding of what a jurisdiction wants requires a procedural approach to defining the public interest in terms of a process, not a predetermined set of ideals. The “procedural conception of the public interest makes virtually no distinction between political processes and the substance of the public interest” (94). Instead, the very nature of what should be designed for a health care program or a tax incentive, for example, is determined through a process of accommodation and compromise. The needs of policy are often not known in advance and may require some level of deliberation, especially by those affected by a given program.²

In chapter 7, we discussed the importance of defining the nature of the public task or challenge to be implemented by government in order to identify the appropriate form of CSC (if any) to be applied to the effort. As Bozeman explained, determining the nature of the public interest may be a process in and of itself as different populations are likely to have different preferences for a particular program. Within the scope of democratic accountability, the ways by which the public interest is defined will be just as important as the institutional mechanisms designed to ensure that it is achieved.

Table 10.1 summarizes the contributions of this select group of scholars who are relevant to our thinking about democratic accountability, the public interest, and CSC. As we have discussed throughout this book, defining the nature of the public task to be implemented through a cross-sector approach and adapting the appropriate institutional approaches and leadership strategies for their implementation is essential for ensuring their accountability. There always will be a tension between trying to establish, measure, and achieve specific goals, objectives, or results of a government policy and the realization, especially in CSC, that these often emerge as the collaboration evolves. Public managers should come to collaboration with some sense of the public interest involved and results sought. However, they need to be flexible and allow the specific actions and tasks to evolve as collaborators interact with themselves and the public.

CSCs require flexibility on the part of public managers. Dictating policies and approaches as when public services are provided directly by government or a traditional contract will not work. Yet flexibility does not mean that standards are not set, expectations established, and outcomes monitored. A challenge in managing CSCs is to recognize when in the process of their design and management flexibility is best. For example, when working with a specific type of public-private partnership for infrastructure, flexibility is needed in the earliest stages, allowing new approaches to be considered and negotiated. Once the terms of the partnership are set, private sector partners should expect that they will accept some of the risks of unanticipated events, and change orders in contract modifications would not be an option. Such an arrangement improves the quality of bids. Alternatively, networks and IPSPs excel at adapting to changes and their environment. Public managers should anticipate that what was negotiated and set out for partners might be reassessed just six months out.

Outcome-Based Performance

Shortly after his appointment as incident commander for the Hurricane Katrina response in Louisiana in 2004, Thad Allen was challenged to communicate a common mission among the multiple governmental and nongovernmental entities mobilized in the area. As we noted in the previous chapter, his approach was to call all members of the response teams to a large airplane hangar in the city and announce using a loudspeaker that he empathized with their efforts, thanked them for their work, and asked them to treat every victim they encountered “as a member of their family.” The simple idea of treating storm victims with a level of familiarity that all responders could relate to helped to build a common purpose among the federal, state, and local government staff, as well as the nonprofit and private sector staff working in the region. While some common purposes are proffered to collaborators and others are cocreated among the participants, the key is to identify a frame of reference that drives people of different backgrounds toward a common outcome or result.

One pitfall of CSC is the failure of participants to acknowledge that the goals of business will seldom be the same ones as of government or nonprofit organizations. Each party to the transaction is hoping to achieve something different from their work together: for the public sector, it is often the advancement of policy objectives; for the nonprofit sector, it is to fulfill their social purpose; and for the private sector, it is often profits. What is important is not goal alignment but a common purpose that leads to a set of agreed-to results, outputs, or outcomes that advance the disparate interests of collaborators, which in turn become the mechanism to measure the effects of the collaboration and achieve shared accountability.

The PPP for the Port of the Miami Tunnel project, discussed in chapter 4, provides an interesting illustration of how the public and private sectors can support a common purpose for different reasons. The Florida Department of Transportation, in collaboration with the City of Miami, entered into a thirty-four-year PPP worth $1.4 billion to improve freight transportation around Miami (AECOM Technology Corporation 2007). The partnership helped the state and the city to achieve a roadway system that ensured cargo entering the nearby port would bypass the downtown area; the private vendor to the partnership received assurances of ongoing (availability) payments from the city over thirty-four years. Both the state and the private sector cared about the larger objective of building an effective and efficient tunnel system to transport freight. Yet the private and public partners had different reasons for this interest.

Clear goal setting by each CSC actor can facilitate cooperation as long as collaborators can maintain some flexibility. Goals in the public realm, for example, set boundaries about what government will and will not do from a policy perspective as they engage in CSCs. In CSCs, private and nonprofit actors are not setting policy but are interested collaborators. Different organizations can have different goals, but that does not mean that they cannot work together toward the same purpose, outcomes, or results.

By reframing the question of how to structure CSCs from goal alignment to specific result measurements, public managers and actors in these relationships establish a clear and straightforward method to jointly monitor progress through a specific and quantifiable set of results, outputs, or outcomes that the collaboration is accomplishing. For example, in the case of the Miami Tunnel PPP, outcomes included reduction in levels of traffic congestion and increased safety. The Department of Systems Management for Human Services in Fairfax County, Virginia, used a network to assist those in need in the county; among the outcome measures was “the percentage of need achieved,” a concept readily acceptable to a variety of government and nonprofit organizations.

Shorter-term or intermediate measures that meet the performance measurement criteria indicated in chapter 7 provide near-term indicators of the success or failure of the CSC. For example, such an outcome measure might be to reduce the level of a certain urban pollutant. While the long-term goal would be to improve the health of urban residents, reducing pollution is an outcome that would help attain that long-term goal.

Coming to agreement on such results or outcomes can take time, and it is time that not all members want to spend, but it is essential for achieving shared accountability. Often collaborators have not thought of what specific outcomes their efforts should achieve. It is in the public manager’s interest to focus the group on quantifying their anticipated outcomes as an essential basis for accountability and the success of the collaboration.

Creating Value in CSCs

Public managers should approach cross-sector relationships by understanding the value they can create. Consideration of the value that is created by the efforts of CSCs not only is a useful way to think about the impact these collaborations have, but it is an essential calculation by CSC members regarding the usefulness of their participation. Creating value that is judged to be important to CSC members is a key reason for them to remain with the CSC and make their best efforts to ensure its success. Creating value means that the actions of collaborators will not shift or reallocate resources from one group to another, but create value to all parties. Understanding the value stemming from the actions of the collaboration and how those benefits are captured by citizens and the collaborators makes it clearer what benefits are accrued. If public managers understand how much value each of the collaborators will capture, it is easier to engage the relationships.

A variety of theories approach the concept of value creation (Dobb 1973). For the purposes of CSC accountability, two ways are considered: public value and shared value. Public value is measured and assessed much differently from value in the private sector. Although private managers can gauge success through a variety of financial measures, public manager success is less clear because what they produce is more “ambiguous” (Moore 1995). Public value creation therefore revolves around the idea of justifying means to ends: there needs to be agreement around what outcomes public managers work toward in order to justify the resources used. Since management in the public sector occurs through the allocation of scarce resources, that allocation must be worth the effort. Adopting an understanding of the public value created enables us to “evaluate the efforts of public sector managers; not in the economic marketplace of individual consumers but in the political marketplace of citizens and the collective decisions of representative democratic institutions” (Moore 1995, 31).

In addition to the idea of public value, CSCs create shared value. Shared value lies at the “intersection between society and corporate performance” (Porter and Kramer 2011) and is defined as the “policies and operating practices that enhance the competitiveness of a company while simultaneously advancing the economic and social conditions in the communities in which it operates” (6). In this way, shared value “focuses on the connections between societal and economic progress” (4–5).

Inherent in this concept is the idea that businesses are compelled to think about the bottom-line or reputational benefits from corporate social responsibility. Companies should consider all aspects of their work by recognizing how social factors are just as important in defining a market as economic ones. Porter and Kramer argue that adopting a shared value approach benefits business, government, and citizens. The pursuit of shared value leads businesses to be more innovative and grow, government benefits from businesses that are responsive and open to collaboration, and citizens benefit from the value created by the CSC.

It is important to recognize that these ideas of shared value contradict traditional definitions of capitalism and neoclassical economic models, and they run counter to Milton Friedman’s (1962) argument that a company is an entirely self-contained entity. Friedman advocated that society existed outside the scope of business considerations, and therefore pursuing only profit is important for firms. This perspective, however, is shortsighted. Businesses do not operate in a vacuum: they are highly responsive to the communities in which they operate and need to acknowledge their role within them. Adopting a shared value approach and engaging government and nonprofits in various collaborative arrangements not only makes good business sense but creates value that is a strong motivator for taking up collaborations in the first place.

Trusted Partners

As we noted in previous chapters, trust is essential for successful CSCs: trust means that participants have faith in one another’s abilities and commitments to achieving a shared purpose. Successful collaborations are built on trust and often lead to greater collaborative productivity (Carnevale 1995). In chapter 3 we discussed three levels of trust when working in a collaborative contracting environment that are also important for any collaborative arrangement:

1. Contractual trust—adhering to the agreement. Hardin (2004) refers to this as “encapsulated interest”—the collaborator’s interests align with governments because it is in the collaborator’s interest to accomplish what it agreed to accomplish. This basic level of trust also must exist in any CSC.
2. Competence trust—recognition by the public manager of the special expertise or local knowledge of the collaborator and allowing them discretion within the confines of that competence area. Although this is not yet a partnership, there is genuine collaboration and a respect for each party’s expertise and judgment, a necessary condition in any successful collaboration.
3. Goodwill trust—confidence that the collaborator will go beyond the minimum in order to achieve mutual objectives. As a result of repeated interaction and collaboration, the collaborator will have considerable latitude on how to proceed and on daily decision making. The collaboration now begins to resemble a true partnership.

To achieve democratic accountability, we add two additional dimensions of trust: social trust, which promotes mutual credibility, and fairness trust, that is, faith that the relationship will be ethical and fair:

4. Social trust—the interest and support of citizens in the efforts of their government. Social trust is built on a healthy amount of social capital, which is cultivated over time. One of the major responsibilities of public managers in CSC is to engage citizens to ensure that their views are heard and valued.
5. Fairness trust—citizen confidence that government will act for the benefit of all, not just a favored few. Trust in government also results from confidence that government will be fair and ethical, which is often predicated on past performance. When there is public cynicism about government, citizens are less willing to trust other people in general, which collectively lowers public trust (Brewer and Hayllar 2005; Wuthnow 1998; Berman 1997) and can erode confidence in collaborative projects. Developing a culture of trust creates an environment where information can be openly shared and actors can acquire sensitive information needed to make decisions on complex policy issues (Brewer and Hayllar 2005).

The public’s trust is particularly important in CSCs because citizens often interact with direct service providers who operate outside government. For example, health programs provided through Medicaid and Medicare often involve many groups of nonprofit and private sector physicians who administer direct care to patients. Without a clear understanding of the nature of nongovernmental involvement, citizens may question the motives of other organizations that are operating in the name of the public.

Furthermore, the increased incorporation of user fees in social services provided by nonprofit organizations (National Center for Charitable Statistics 2012) means that the collaborators in both the public and the nonprofit sectors need to demonstrate the reasons for and value of the fees to end users. A similar trend is occurring in the transportation sector in the United States, where the increase in PPPs for roadways results in more toll roads. If the collaborators do not explain the benefits that are intended from these fees, public resentment can disrupt collaborations that are designed to serve the public.

Collaborators should strive to become “trusted partners” (Forrer et al. 2012), a notion that elaborates on relationships between partners within collaborations. Participants need to have trust that they will benefit from the relationship; otherwise the collaboration will be unsustainable as members exit the relationship. Without trusted partners, the relationship falls apart because contributors begin to focus on the achievement of their own short-term goals without recognizing the achievement of wider social goals. Trusted partners recognize that different decisions by the CSC may have implications for the participants and their own organizations.

Trusted partners are empathetic in that they care about the other partner’s problems and issues and work together to address those concerns when possible—even when the issue has little or no relevance to a partner. By collaborating to solve problems related to the CSC mission and in a way that addresses the problems and issues that the partners face, CSCs develop devoted and committed collaborators. The commitment to understanding success not just in terms of the CSC mission but also to the successful experiences of partners improves the chances that the CSC will accomplish what it set out to do, thereby being accountable to each collaborative partner and to the public.

In summary, trusted partners in CSC move beyond minimal adherence to contractual agreements toward acceptance of the competence of their partners in the CSC. The ultimate goal of trusted partners is achieving a level of goodwill trust, social trust, and fairness with each other that leads to joint efforts without detailed ongoing monitoring. Partners also are conscious of the need to develop social trust with the public at large through ethical dealings, communications, and citizen involvement.

One cautionary note: because cross-sector collaborators often have different motives for entering into a collaboration, CSC involves some melding or blurring of roles. It is the responsibility of the public manager to ensure that such melding is in the public interest and that public values are not sacrificed in the collaboration. Many in the public administration community are concerned that private and nonprofit interests may override public values and are skeptical that trust is a solid foundation for accountability. Public managers must build trusting partnerships in CSC, but in the final analysis, they have to demonstrate that the results of collaborations benefit the general public.

Enhancing Citizen Participation

Greater citizen participation in providing information about their needs, the quality of public services, and how that compares to their expectations is one way to enhance democratic accountability in CSCs. Public managers participating in CSCs play a central role in aligning policy objectives, public sector stakeholder interests, and citizen involvement in the shaping of policy outcomes.

Reenergizing the idea of citizenship is a key component of maintaining democratic accountability. Today public managers are increasingly turning to methods of engaging citizens directly to determine the scope and scale of government programs. At the federal level, for example, the Obama administration developed the Open Government Initiative in 2009 to solicit comments and feedback from constituents to guide federal decision making (White House 2009).

State and local governments are using social media to promote accountability in ways that could be adapted by networks, partnerships, and IPSPs. Nearly all city and county governments are embracing social media platforms to share information with residents. Town hall meetings are posted on YouTube or hosted entirely electronically, city council members Tweet with constituents to share their involvement in the community and receive feedback, and Facebook is used to promote local events and seek feedback on community initiatives.

Information and communication technology (ICT) offers citizens access to more information on public service delivery than ever before. The potential for government to engage citizens through social media and related forms of ICT is enormous. Government agencies have engaged citizens through various innovations, such as “e-government,” presenting citizens with options for providing information or receiving administrative services. Examples of e-government include comments on the creation of public facilities, real-time information on the needs of victims of natural disasters, updates on traffic delays, and renewing driver’s licenses or car registration. However, such uses of ICT generally distribute information in one direction, from government to citizens or from citizens to government, without further interactions.

The creation of a bus stop design in Salt Lake City provides one example of how public participation is improved through the use of ICT. In this case, the government adopted a crowdsourcing approach to generating ideas for the structure’s design.³ It created a website, outlined general expectations for the structure, and allowed citizen contributors to come up with their own ideas for how it should look. Over 4,654 unique visitors per day went to the site during the peak of the project, and a conceptual design for the bus stop that the government likely would not have envisioned on its own emerged (Brabham, Sanchez, and Bartholomew 2009).

Tina Nabatchi (2012) describes how a procedural approach to defining the public interest can be applied to government programs. Her explanations address themes that were raised earlier on the importance of building trust among relevant stakeholders in collaborations. Nabatchi addresses democratic accountability through the concept of public participation and the varied techniques of selecting among competing public values. She argues that engaging citizens in understanding and assessing public service outcomes entails citizens’ power sharing with public managers and involvement in substantive decisions about program goals and expectations.

In this way, public participation expands our understanding of democratic participation from indirect participation, whereby citizens support representatives in public office or advocacy groups to make decisions for them, to include direct participation, whereby constituents directly influence public sector outcomes through in-person or technology-based forums.

Social Media and Citizen Engagement

The expansion of social media allows a richer type of interaction of government officials, CSCs, and citizens. Social media allow users to express their values and preferences within a public space and exchange ideas with others—both friends and strangers. The aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti demonstrated how social media assisted first responders in identifying immediate needs. In the wake of the disaster, an open source crisis-mapping program was adopted to translate social media comments into a picture of the parts of Port-au-Prince that were safe, those that needed water or other aid, and other related issues (Heinzelman and Waters 2010). A team of graduate students based in Boston collected text messages, reviewed Twitter posts, and collected Facebook data from the affected region to map out trends of what people were talking about on the ground. Both governments and nonprofits used this information to target relief where it was most needed.

Transportation officials are adopting social media to help them gauge roadway and transit traffic delays, as well as citizen perceptions of them. Collecting Twitter posts within a given metropolitan region or posts related to a specific transit system can help public managers identify trends in travel and gain a better understanding of citizen perceptions and travel patterns in response to delays. This monitoring function for public managers is particularly important in CSCs, where government may not be the direct service provider but still require monitoring to ensure democratic accountability. Another way that local governments have adopted social media to provide real-time responses to citizens is through the use of GPS devices on trash trucks and snowplows so citizens can individually track the locations of these vehicles.

The way in which citizens conceive their relationship with government and public services is changing dramatically. Rather than seeing themselves as mere taxpayers or clients, many citizens now expect to be treated as joint creators or partners of government services and expect a higher-quality experience (Osborne and Gaebler 1992; Thomas 2012). Social media are powerful tools for improving citizen engagement. The information that social media collect and report regarding the performance of an individual, group, or organization can be harnessed to review processes or strategies used by partnerships, networks, and IPSPs.

By generating an online community, social media broaden the access and participation of citizens in new ways. For example, social media enable local officials to engage with citizens from younger demographics, a group notoriously considered difficult to track down, in ways that were previously considered impossible (Brabham 2009). In addition, citizens who would not be able to attend critical governance meetings in person due to work or family obligations are now able to participate virtually by streaming sessions online or sending feedback and requesting information online.

An Integrated Approach to Mutual Accountability

The four pillars of mutual accountability are reinforcing. For CSCs, public managers need to focus on how they can work toward outcomes that generate value for each member, while maintaining trusted partnerships among collaborative partners and keeping communications open to the public. If members of the collaborations fail to adopt an integrated approach and concentrate on only a few of these aspects, the relationship may flounder. It is not enough for CSCs to focus on building trust without understanding the value created by their collective efforts. Alternatively, if they focus on creating a list of shared outcomes without understanding how they relate to the motivations of the partner organizations, the relationship may be short-lived.

The best collaborations are those that cultivate a culture of trust and openness to share information and best practices both vertically and horizontally within an organization and across collaborative partners. Each of the four components—outcome-based performance, public and shared value, trusted partners, and engaged citizens—contributes to developing an environment for collaboration that facilitates accountability by creating a climate where all participants can forecast and measure tangible results from their efforts.

Accountability and Contracting Out

While the accountability demands with traditional contracting are similar to those with CSC, the mechanisms or approaches to maintain accountability for traditional government contractors generally do not apply in partnerships, networks, or IPSPs. In traditional contracts, governments generally can maintain defined standards of conduct because of their principal-agent relationship. Government is in charge of contracting relationships because it controls the way contracts are written and develops all the terms for the relationship. The private party is motivated to follow all of the specifications and rules in the agreement because that is the only way to ensure that the company will be paid. Examples of traditional methods include filing reports on certain activities and bookkeeping against specific standards to demonstrate that contractors are being held accountable. Dicke and Ott (1999) developed a list of techniques for managing government contracts with private and nonprofit organizations that included auditing, monitoring, licensure, markets, the courts, codes of ethics, whistle-blowing, and outcomes-based assessments.

Even with these methods of control, contractors typically are not held to the same ethical standards as public employees. Furthermore, even an agreed-on ethical code of conduct or a contractors’ agreement to abide by certain regulations can be difficult to enforce in government-contractor relationships. A Government Accountability Office report (2010) found that more than twenty federal contractors had violated federal labor laws yet continued to be awarded billions of dollars in government contracts.

Accountability in Partnerships and PPPs

Unlike accountability in contract management, keeping partners accountable requires more than being a smart buyer. In particular, partnerships and PPPs involve many joint responsibilities and commitments with a partner that are not easily severed, as is the case in a short-term contractual relationship. Cancelling contracts is one of the key means governments have to control the behavior of contractors—it is the ultimate sanction. Cancelling a partnership with a nonprofit or with a private partner is one of the last things governments want to do except in the most extreme cases. For PPPs, a long-term perspective about partnership relationships is necessary.

PPPs require clear expectations and oversight both before and after contract formation. A major challenge in many complicated PPP arrangements is that public managers are often inexperienced in dealing with the private sector, including their inability to analyze private sector financial plans, markets, and available incentives to ensure appropriate oversight. Without prior experience, they will necessarily depend on consultants and advice from other governments (which have experience with PPPs) to assist them in the design of the contract. This is why organizational learning must be a part of the new collaborative environment, a topic discussed in chapter 11.

When effective expectations and oversight are not in place as part of the contract, public managers often must try to develop them as the partnership is evolving. However, as the Coast Guard Deepwater case clearly illustrates, the failure to develop appropriate performance measures at the start and the inability to monitor their partner effectively led to a significant failure and the ultimate termination of the partnership, at significant cost to the Coast Guard.

Once the contract has been awarded, the public and private partners are involved in ongoing negotiations about the delivery of services. Most PPPs last longer than election cycles or even the average tenure of many public managers. In such cases, accountability depends heavily on anticipating the ex post facto issues and relationships. Because of their long period of performance, the combination of thoughtful procedures and decision rules embedded in the agreement and developing a trusted partnership is a requirement for appropriate accountability.

Exercising accountability in PPPs ultimately depends on clarifying responsibilities in relationships. The director of the UK National Audit Office, James Robertson (personal communication 2008), claimed that creating some flexibility is an essential component of PPP contracts. It signaled accommodation to the other partners and reassured them about the long-term prospects for the partnership. Transparency about performance standards and the PPP’s actual performance are also critical. Negotiated standards need to be reasonable and reflect a proper balance of risk taking by both parties. The quality of the interactions between public and private partners affects the overall ability of an agency to monitor compliance by the contractor and adjust performance incentives accordingly.

In this respect, public managers can learn from their own interactions with other governmental units. Intergovernmental scholars have noted that when one level of government works with another level (e.g., federal to state) on grants or contracts, these relationships are not one-sided, with one government dictating to the other. The relationship often involves bargaining so that each side feels its priorities are reflected in the final agreement (Ingram 1977; Derthick 2013). Whether in a partnership or a network, each side can often exit the arrangement. Thus, public managers need to balance their own policy concerns and objectives with those of the collaborators and find methods to focus on the areas (such as key performance indicators) that are most important to maintain the public interest.

Performance standards and clear expectations for each partner create a basis for trust. The success of the PPP in its service delivery is tied to the success of each of the partners. The private sector strives to meet the standards based on a return on its expenditures. The government seeks to support the project and the private sector partner to ensure citizens are receiving the services they expect. Structuring PPPs properly creates the incentive for both parties to make their best efforts to provide quality public services.

Accountability in Networks

Eggers and Goldsmith (2004) identified four key issues in network governance to ensure public accountability: properly aligning the incentives, routinely measuring performance, building trust in the network, and appropriately sharing risk. Many of these same factors have been previously identified as important to PPPs. It makes sense that similar factors help ensure accountability in PPPs and networks. Both approaches represent government efforts to engage collaborators to carry out government responsibilities without having direct control over the actions of the PPP or the network.

With multiple collaborators in networks, the need to have specific shared outcomes identified and committed to at the start of the collaboration is critical. With just the government and a business involved, PPPs rely more on continual adjustments and accommodations with the aim of making sure the PPP meets its goals and objectives. The time it would take to use a similar approach with networks is overwhelming and not the best use of everyone’s time and resources. Negotiating specific outcomes in advance is the best way for networks to deliver quality public services, leading to collaborative accountability. A critical role for public managers in network governance is to ensure that all network participants and the general public have meaningful input into the deliberations on outcomes.

In the Fairfax County human services project, county leaders used an effective formula of mutual accountability: shared values, outcome measures, and trust. The shared value was to assist those in need in the county, whether the aid came from the public, private, or nonprofit sectors. Among the outcome measures was “percentage of need achieved,” a clear indicator of how successful the total network was in achieving their shared value. Trust was built in a number of ways: by involving nonprofit actors in developing the system and measuring performance, the widespread sharing of information among public and nonprofit agencies, and a “change-centric” environment where the door was always open to suggestions for improving the system. This approach led to a strong collaborative accountability among the network members.

Accountability in Independent Public-Services Providers

Accountability in IPSPs is the most challenging for public managers because they have considerable autonomy and independence from governments. There are twin accountability issues for IPSPs: participants need to establish accountability within their own collaboration, and public managers need to determine whether and to what extent the IPSP should be accountable to the public interest. However, because of the independent nature of IPSPs, government cannot employ traditional accountability measures or approaches.

The best approach for public managers to take is to engage IPSPs in respectful, cooperative interactions. Public managers should consider what sources of leverage are available through government actions that might influence any given IPSP. There are four principal sources of influence of public managers:

1. Permission: The IPSP may be engaged in an activity that requires public sector permission or authorization, such as licenses, permits, or certifications.
2. Information: The IPSP might be more effective if government provided certain information, such as case files, and access to databases that are routinely collected by government agency.
3. Funding: The government may have discretionary funds that can be used to support the IPSP activity.
4. Citizen interface: Government has the political legitimacy that the IPSP might not have in terms of interactions with citizens and communities.

If public managers can influence an IPSP, what sort of accountability measures should be advocated? First, public managers should advocate for full transparency of its members and activities. Second, they should encourage the IPSP to establish clear performance measures to both hold members accountable and provide appropriate public accountability. Third, they might negotiate certain standards or activities consistent with meeting public policy goals and objectives. Fourth, they can monitor and report citizen concerns and broader effects on the public.