Accountability

Family Resemblances: Accountability, Responsibility, Liability

The term accountable originates from the Latin computare: to count. To be accountable required a person to produce “a count” of either the properties or money that had been left in his or her care. This meaning has endured in all those forms of accountability that are exercised through financial bookkeeping or budgetary records. But more discursive meanings of being accountable, in the sense of “giving an account,” also emerged early in the history of the term. Accountability as an abstract noun therefore refers to both the capacity of, and the obligation on, someone to produce an account. Yet, it was not in political or legal discussions that accountability first developed as a term of art, or as a fully developed and self-standing concept. In politics and administration, responsibility was the technical term that was preferred to indicate the duty that persons in public authority had to “respond” in their conduct and actions as public officials. In law, liability was (and is) preferred to indicate that by doing a certain action (or entering into a certain contract), a person has put himself or herself under an obligation and is therefore answerable for the consequences following from that action (or from entering into that contract). Thus, for a considerable time, accountability was part of a family of words in English that covered a number of interrelated meanings that had to do with issues of political representation, executive and administrative responsibility, and, more loosely, legal liability. The relationships between and within these semantic fields, however, have lately been transformed, with accountability taking a life of its own.

Two facts stand to indicate the late emergence of accountability as a specific concept. One is its absence from dictionaries and encyclopedias until fairly recently (the 1980s). The other is the lack of precise equivalents in most other languages. This has been noted in the literature because of the internationalization of academic life and the increasing dominance of English as a lingua franca (particularly in international organizations). As accountability has acquired a more [Page 2]prominent role in discussions conducted in English about governance, public administration reform and the quality of democracy, it has become evident how the semantic field covered by the various uses of accountability cannot easily be captured in other languages, where it was traditionally translated by a group of words that had a closer affinity to the term responsibility: responsabilité (French), responsabilidad (Spanish), Verantwortlichkeit (German). Interestingly, in the romance languages there is no specific word for liability either, which is similarly rendered by contextual uses of the equivalents of responsibility.

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