Responsibility

Responsibility is an important concept for governance because it requires individuals and institutions to be answerable for their actions both in the public domain (to specific political authorities) and in the private domain (to themselves and their families). In politics, a balance had to be struck between responsibility, on one hand, and, on the other hand, the notion of individual or collective rights, that is, political and institutional arrangements or particular goods and opportunities that are guaranteed protection by the law, whether domestic or international. Consequently, major political debates have tended to focus upon the identification of the political, moral, and legal principles upon which individual and collective responsibility and rights should be based; the balance that should [Page 837]be drawn between those rights and responsibilities; the extent to which they should be exercised individually or collectively; and whether they should be exercised in the public domain of the state and politics or in the private domain of the market and the family.

Political responsibility has been particularly salient in the English model of parliamentary government. The convention of ministerial responsibility has required individual Cabinet ministers to be answerable to the Westminster Parliament for the actions of all those working within their ministry, even when errors of judgment, conduct, or policy implementation have occurred without the minister's express knowledge. At the same time, under the convention of collective Cabinet responsibility, individual Cabinet ministers have been expected to support the collectively agreed upon policy of the government, even where they have found themselves dissenting from that policy. Only rarely, such as on issues of political or moral conscience (for example, the death penalty and abortion, or major constitutional issues, notably the 1975 referendum on the terms of the United Kingdom's membership of the European Economic Community) has this convention been suspended.

During the 1980s, a series of major environmental catastrophes involving transnational corporations (TNCs) (notably the poisonous gas leak from the Union Carbide Corporation plant at Bhopal, India, in December 1984, and the major spillage from the Exxon Valdez oil tanker in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in March 1989) led to increasing demands for corporations to both behave responsibly and be held accountable for their actions. Critics held that there was an essential conflict of interest between the desire of corporations to maximize their profits, in the interests of their shareholders, and the need to behave in an ethical manner to address societal interests. Such demands for the exercise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) were given renewed impetus during 2002, with the respective filing for bankruptcy of Enron, America's seventh largest corporation, and WorldCom, the subject of the largest accountancy fraud in American corporate history. However, the debate over how best to ensure CSR remains unresolved between the advocates of a voluntary approach, based upon corporate self-regulation, and those demanding that corporate responsibility be given a statutory legal framework.