From Public to Transnational Administration: A System-Level Perspective on Accountability Beyond State Borders

Abstract

With the growing scholarship on international bureaucracies, public administration research (PA) is transcending “methodological nationalism” boundaries. However, PA scholarship has not yet properly examined accountability issues, and a system-level perspective is necessary for that purpose, as the scholarship on “transnational administration” suggests. Relying on the contribution of international relations (IR) scholarship, which is more sensitive to accountability issues, this paper highlights the multifaceted policy-making configurations that have emerged transnationally and identifies the associated core accountability challenges. After considering the intraorganizational level of international bureaucracies studied by PA scholars, the paper examines accountability issues at the organizational and interorganizational levels of transnational governance spheres, where policy-making combines quiet politics with a crucial role for the unelected. The paper reviews the accountability of international organizations and the conflicting pressures to which they are subject. Then, it highlights the implications for accountability of the development of multilevel bureaucratic networks and of the trend toward informalization. Challenges to accountability are accentuated by the hybridization of governance, which is studied next. The paper also critically examines the operation of interdependent accountability “forums” in transnational governance and the accountability issues that affect them, before showing what IR scholarship can in turn learn from PA research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.