Public Administration

Accountability and Control

Public Administration: Accountability & Control
Bureaucratic Responsiveness; Representative Bureaucracy; Citizens
Engagement in Public Service; Accountability & Control, The Concept
and Approaches to Public Accountability of Public Service; Institutional
Framework for Administrative Accountability; Legislative, Executive and
Judicial Control over Administration, Administrative Corruption; Role of
Civil Society in Good Governance, Media, Interest Groups, Civil Society
Organizations; The Situation in Pakistan.
Bureaucratic Responsiveness
• Responsiveness --- the quality of reacting quickly and positively
• Responsiveness also requires meaningful access to the right decision makers and a legitimate
opportunity to be heard. Access is a key step in the policy process and, without it,
responsiveness cannot be ensured
• Bureaucratic responsiveness
Responsive /reactive to public wishes/needs in general or to the specific segment
(Discretion and reliance on skills, limited resources with government)
Representative Bureaucracy
• Term is generally attributed to J. Donald Kingsley's book titled Representative
Bureaucracy that was published in 1944.
• Theory of representative bureaucracy
• Mosher (1968) argued that a bureaucracy can be representative in two ways
• Passive representation it employs minorities and women in numbers proportionate to
their shares of the population
• Active representation press[es] for the interests and desires of those whom he is
presumed to represent”
• Approach work with values and perspectives gained from life histories and
societies
• Make policy decisions while keeping the interest of public at the priority
Significance:
• Poicy making and implementation
• Strengthening of government
• Effective policy outcomes
• Facilitates responsiveness of bureaucracy
• Disadvantages
• Increase bias
• Can become ineffectual bureaucracy
• Citizens’s engagement in public sector
Citizen engagement is a form of interaction between citizens and their
governments. It can happen at any stage of the development or implementation of
government policy and the delivery of public services, or be triggered by events in
local areas
Citizen’s enagement in Pakistan
• citizens to make complaints about service-delivery citizens to make
complaints about service-delivery
• ‘trust deficit’
Drivers of citizen’s engagement
• Right to Services (RtS) and Right to Information (RtI) legislation
• Improved services and citizen-state relationships
• Digital Technology
• Strategic litigation --- through media to prompt the Supreme Court to act suo
moto on issues of concern to citizens
Significance
• Improving effectiveness of service delivery
• Serving public interest
• Enhancing legitimacy
• Strengthening accountability
Accountability
• "Accountability" stems from late Latin accomptare (to account), a prefixed form
of computare (to calculate), which in turn derived from putare (to reckon)
• ‘Accountable’ seems to have come into usage in the English language for the
first time in 1583 in the financial context.
• Accountability is a principle according to which a person or institution is
responsible for a set of duties and can be required to give an account of their
fulfilment to an authority that is in a position to issue rewards or punishment
• Administrative accountability is the sum total of constitutional, statutory,
administrative and judicial rules and precedents and the established practices
by means of which public officials may be
held accountable for their official actions
• Control is the process of ensuring that actual activities conform to the
established standards and laid down procedure
Control process
• Types of control
• Internal Control ( form part of the administrative machinery and work
automatically and spontaneously with the movement of the machinery)
Budgetary control
Personnel management control (clear lines of responsibility)
0rganization and Method system --- scientific method
• Tours of higher officials;
• Inspections’ by officers from the headquarters
• Periodical survey reports by administrative inquiry committees
Administrative ethics and Professional standards
Leadership
Annual Confidential reports (ACRs)/ Performance evaluation reports (PERs)
• External Control
Legislature
Executive
Judiciary
• Legislative control
• Questions
first hour of every day sitting of legislature is known as the question hour.
Every legislators,after giving due notice
are entitled to put questions and supplementary questions to the
ministers about the state of public administration
• Resolutions & Motions
Resolutions and motions are of two kinds i.e. firstly, those
whose object is to censure a particular minister or government as a whole. This leads to
dismissal of government or ministry
secondly those,which recommend some course of action to be adopted. it may or may not be
accepted by the government.
• Debates and Discussions
• Passing Laws
• Control of Appropriations
• Audit & Report
• Committees of legislature
Public Accounts Committee, Committee on Subordinate legislation, petitions Committee,
Committee on Public Service
• Executive Control
• Policy-Making
The chief executive along with his cabinet, control the administration
through policy-making.
• Budgetary System
• Recruitment system
The third system of executive control works through recruitments
of public personnel. This is usually placed in the hands of an
independent recruiting agency like public service commission
JUDICIAL CONTROL (Remedies)
• Writ of Mandamus
• Rule of Law system
• Habeas Corpus
• Injuction
• Prohibition
• Certiorari
• Quo-Warranto
• Administrative Corruption
Spreading of infringing on public funds and profiteering from public posts in the society.
Spreading of bribery crimes, profiteering, abuse of authority, embezzlement among public
servants
Combating Corruption
• Precaution or prevention:
• Studying negative phenomena and gaps in laws & regulations and recommend the
suitable means to avoid its occurrences.
• Improving the sources of information to early detect the contraventions especially in
the sphere of tenders.
• Verifying the procedures of investigations on the candidate for the top management
posts and applied the code of criteria to achieve integrity and impracticality.
• Carrying our regular investigations on posts more vulnerable to corruption.
• Initiative policy toward corruption through:
• Seizing infringing on public funds cases and the deviation of public servants.
• Persuading the cases of profiteering of public posts and illegal gain cases.
• Persuading the cases of custom &tax evasion.
• Paying a great attention to the citizens' complaints.
• Public awareness