Accountability is most often discussed as a feature of institutional design. It is also a personal obligation — of the people who work within institutions, of the people whose lives are shaped by them, and of the analysts who describe them.
The Personal Obligation
The institutional accountability framework that this blog has advocated — the mechanisms that create real consequences for institutional performance failures, that align institutional behaviour with institutional purpose, and that give the populations affected by institutions the information and the access to hold those institutions accountable — is an advocacy for institutional design choices that no individual can produce alone. But the advocacy for institutional accountability is also a personal obligation that the person who makes it must honour in their own behaviour: the obligation to produce the honest analysis rather than the comfortable one, to name the institutional failures that are politically inconvenient to name as well as the ones that are not, and to acknowledge the specific ways in which the analyst's own institutional position shapes and potentially distorts their analysis.
The personal accountability of the institutional analyst requires the specific intellectual honesty that the structural analysis makes possible but does not guarantee: the acknowledgment that the analytical framework has limits and that those limits have produced errors, the willingness to update the analysis in response to evidence that challenges the framework's predictions, and the honesty about the personal interests and institutional positions that shape the analyst's perspective. The institutional analysis that holds others accountable while exempting the analyst from the same standard of accountability has failed the most important test of intellectual integrity.
What accountability requires of individuals is the same thing it requires of institutions: the genuine commitment to the purposes that accountability is supposed to serve, the honest assessment of performance against those purposes, and the willingness to face the consequences of failure rather than to manage the appearance of success. This applies to institutional designers, institutional operators, and institutional analysts equally. It applies to this blog.
Discussion