Oversight

Oversight is a broad term used to describe a variety of actions related to management and supervision in accountability relationships. Oversight is often associated with efforts of a congress or parliament to manage agencies that implement policy. The actions that legislatures take in this process, such as investigations and hearings, are referred to as legislative oversight. This use of oversight is firmly rooted in conceptions of the unitary state, in which power clearly flows in one direction within a bounded institution. In governance, however, more complex accountability relationships are recognized and, consequently, oversight takes on a broader definition. An example of nonstate uses of the term are arrangements for nongovernmental organization (NGO) oversight of working conditions in private firms, which illustrate the wide spectrum of accountability relationships to which the term oversight is applied.

Oversight strategies have been parsed into two main forms, police patrol and fire alarm oversight. Police patrol oversight consists of active surveillance by a centralized body to ensure accountability. For example, in principal-agent relationships, police patrol oversight involves the principal actively sampling the agent's actions to detect and deter transgressions. This model has limitations due to the high costs and difficulties of monitoring.

The fire alarm model relies less on active monitoring by a central authority than police patrol oversight and instead opens up channels for information to be passively gathered from third parties that may also be empowered to take their own action. In this model, third parties, such as NGOs, identify problems and either bring the problems to the attention of power holders or seek redress themselves. Fire alarm oversight is more decentralized than police patrol oversight. It allows for, and depends on, action by a multitude of actors. For example, a politician can choose not to review the actions of an agency regularly, but to investigate after its constituents complain about a problem at the agency. Using this strategy, the politician oversees the agency without actively monitoring the agency's action. Fire alarm oversight is more consistent with governance than police patrol oversight, as it deemphasizes the role of the state and focuses on the importance of nonstate actors. Institutions can be designed specifically to engender fire alarm oversight without any intervention by the centralized authority. For example, many environmental policies in the United States have provisions allowing for oversight by nonstate actors, which are also [Page 655]empowered to take action through the courts after identifying deficiencies in implementation.

Thus in governance, the relatively simple action of oversight, as an effort to supervise and manage, becomes more complex than a simple hierarchical relationship. Oversight takes on a multitude of forms and engages a variety of types of actors in the task of management and supervision.