This proposal came about because it is obvious that the highest order of public accountability is at the inter-nation level. The writer sent the proposal to both Stephen Lewis and Lloyd Axworthy, with the reasons, but received no reply from either person.

18 June 2003 (updated Feb.06)

The purpose of public accountability is to increase fairness in society. Public accountability is the obligation of those we can  identify as the directing minds of governments, corporations and other authorities to explain, publicly, fully and fairly, before and after the fact, how they are carrying out responsibilities that affect the public in important ways. The accounting obligation itself is an obligation in common fairness. (Note 1)

Whereas responsibility is the obligation to act, accountability is the obligation to explain the discharge of responsibilities. These are related but separate obligations, and confusing the two allows needed public explanations to be avoided. The public accounting obligation is nonpartisan and does not tell authorities how to do their jobs. It is only the obligation to explain.

Principles of public accountability and standards for public accountings apply to relationships between citizens and authorities, but they logically apply as well to relationships among nations.

If the UN were to formulate an unassailable concept of nations’ public accounting obligations to other nations and reasonable basic standards for the public reporting of their intentions and reasons, the concept of public accountability could be applied in a disciplined way to all nations in the aim of increasing fairness across the planet. 

Within any country, citizens usually rely on stated or implicit responsibilities of governments and corporations and the usual regulatory policing that goes with it — to the extent it exists. But citizens have not installed the obligation of full and fair public reporting by authorities, and thus forego the self-regulating influence that the public reporting obligation can be expected to exert in the public interest. Without the public accounting obligation, citizens can then expect to see only continuation of litigation and protest parades, with the most powerful usually winning and the agendas of the powerful not changing.

Accounting to a reasonable standard means that the directing minds of authorities will publicly explain their responsibilities as they see them and, before the fact, will explain their intentions that would affect citizens in important ways, their reasons for their intentions, and their intended performance standards for themselves and those whom they oversee. After the fact they will explain their actual performance and the outcomes, as they see them, and the learning available to them and how they applied it. 

This accounting standard logically applies to nations when their intentions can reasonably be deemed to affect other countries in important ways. And it is hard to imagine the  concept of public accountability running counter to the teachings of the great religions.

If authorities are required to meet reasonable standards of public answering, it can be expected to exert a self-regulating effect on their conduct that would act in the public interest. This is because the requirement to answer publicly will tend to lead an authority to state a praiseworthy intention and be able to say the intention was achieved. But, since accountings of intentions and achievement can be intentionally misleading, the precautionary principle applied to civics says that important public reporting must be validated by independent public audit of its fairness and completeness.

Holding to account means exacting public answering and validating it to make real intentions and performance visible. Once underlying agendas are made visible, they undergo what Lori Wallach of Washington-based Public Citizen calls the “Dracula Test” that can cause ill-intentioned agendas to self-destruct.

In addition to its self-regulating influence on authorities, adequate public answering informs citizens for their decision-making. When citizens know the intentions of authorities, they can commend the intentions or act to alter or halt them. As George Washington put it, in a 1796 letter, “I am sure the mass of Citizens in these United States mean well, and I firmly believe they will always act well, whenever they can obtain a right understanding of matters….”

There are many reasons why we do not have adequate public accounting from authorities, but obvious reasons are that authorities don’t want it and have thus far been able to control or block the means of installing it, and citizens in the democracies have been unduly deferential to those in power and have not attempted to exact adequate public accountings. 

In response to the cartoon character Pogo’s famous observation, “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” it is likely that if citizens are shown how to obtain adequate public answering, their motivation to obtain it will increase. This in turn should lead to reduced citizen cynicism, and in due course increased public trust in our institutions — something needed to make society work properly.

No political party in a democracy would argue that citizens should not be adequately informed. Whether in democracies or dictatorships, the fairness obligation of directing minds to explain their intentions holds. But the moment one says the word “democracy” the answering obligation is clear and cannot be dismissed or argued against. Thus no executive government claiming to be a government of a democracy can credibly say to the world that the requirement for adequate public answering does not apply to them. As British researchers Patricia Day and Rudolph Klein put it in a 1987 study of accountabilities:

It is a tradition of political thought which sees the defining characteristic of democracy as stemming not merely from the election of those who are given delegated power to run society’s affairs … but from their continuing obligation to explain and justify their conduct in public.

Because the public answering obligation is politically neutral, the UN Secretariat, perhaps working with an appropriate UN committee, has the opportunity to develop and propose to the Assembly a set of basic public accountability standards for nations. Such standards would have the potential of exerting self-regulating influences on nations’ intentions. 

The UN is also logically positioned to create a professionally-knowledgeable audit unit that could carry out the role of attesting to the fairness and completeness of nations’ assertions about their intentions that would affect other countries in important ways. 

The experience of the alleged Iraq weapons, for example, shows that countries powerful enough can act unilaterally. But the obligation to account and reasonable public reporting standards can help to produce publicly the reasoning behind nations’ intentions, and help reduce unwarranted continuing acceptance of a “decree only” approach. For example, the invention of balance sheets and income statements for corporations’ public accountings produced a neutral and fair structure which corporations could not in fairness refuse.

The task would start with internal Secretariat discussion of the usefulness of nations reasonably and formally accounting to each other rather than simply decreeing things, followed by identification of general standards to propose to the Assembly that would withstand fair challenge, followed by a proposal for attestation audit. 

What has been missing in cavalier use of the word “accountability” now fashionable in virtually every country and in every sector within countries, is a common disciplined understanding of what public accountability is and is not, and agreement on the means of producing adequate public answering. 

Becoming the neutral regulator for nations accounting adequately to each in aid of greater fairness would seem a logical and constructive role for the UN to take on.

Henry E. McCandless,
General Convenor,
Citizens’ Circle for Accountability,
Victoria, Canada

Note (1): The concept of accountability was usefully set out in the 1975 Report of the Independent Advisory Committee on the Mandate of the Office of the Auditor General of Canada. The Committee said that accountability is the obligation to answer for a responsibility conferred. The word “conferred” is apt in the government spending context, where a parliament confers rights and obligations on an executive government. But in society generally, important responsibilities attach to power, and to every responsibility affecting the public in important ways there attaches the obligation in fairness for those with the responsibilities to publicly account for how they are carrying out their responsibilities.

(For a more comprehensive examination of the concept and practice of accountability, see the website of the Citizens’ Circle for Accountability at www.accountabilitycircle.org and A Citizen’s Guide to Public Accountability: Changing the Relationship Between Citizens and Authorities by Henry E. McCandless (Trafford, 2002).