How can accountability measures contribute to more effective risk

governance processes? Martin Lodge

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• Why promote accountability & transparency?

• Limitations

• Recipes

The rationale? • The ‘right to know’

• Accountability: the requirement to report to interested party on set standards [backed by sanctions]

• Transparency: making conduct, content and/or outcomes visible from the outside

• A&T as means:

• reduces information-gathering costs

• reduces behaviour-modification costs

Why problematic? • Earthquakes (http://www.geonet.org.nz)

• Terrorism (https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/the-threats/terrorism/threat-levels.html)

• Radon: http://www.ukradon.org/information/ukmaps/englandwales

• Nuclear: http://www.rskonline.de/stellungnahmen---empfehlungen/index.htm

• Pandemics: http://www.ready.gov/pandemic

• Cyber: https://www.allianz-fuer-cybersicherheit.de/ACS/DE/Home/startseite.html

Why problematic?

• Are A&T in tension with requirements of (some) high-level risk governance systems? • Counter-learning

• Audit as questionable programmatic and technological idea

• Measurability – outcome and/or process

• Deterministic/probabilistic and ‘ignorance’

• Risk society

Standard recipes More overlap

Rely on non-standardised mechanisms (cross-sanctions/linkages)

Loss of trust

More bureaucracy

Impose more formal reporting & information revelation

requirements

Protocolisation & Juridification

More benchmarking Allow for comparative

performance assessment & incentives for behaviour

adjustment

Gaming

More professional conversation

Rely on ‘closed’ professional settings

Closure

Limits

• How avoid protocolisation and hierarchy (defensive risk management; senior officials/ministers held to account by junior officials in different ministries)

• How to reduce opportunities for gaming

• How to enhance external scrutiny

• How to sustain ‘trust’

A&T & learning

• External scrutiny & defensive risk management

• Learning as inherent conflict between confirmation and challenge

• Negative vs positive co-ordination in learning

Implications

• High-level risks span all kinds of bureaucratic activities (i.e. different degrees of measurability)

• ‘Trust’ and holding to account is inherently about world views - no universal agreement feasible as to what, how, and why