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Public Accountability: A Catalyst for Good Governance

Public Accountability: A Catalyst for Good Governance

-CA Tripti D.C.

The author is Member of ICAN currently serving as Senior Manager at the Rastriya Banijya Bank Ltd. She can be reached at mail: dc.tripti16@gmail.com

 

Abstract

Effective public accountability serves as the definitive catalyst for good governance, transforming transparency into public trust. For governance to be effective, it must move beyond simple legal regularity and uphold the principle of propriety, which demands ethical and wise decision-making. Restoring public trust requires shifting from reactive reporting to proactive transparency and ensuring that audit findings lead to automatic administrative sanctions. Ultimately, accountability must be a dynamic catalyst that ensures those entrusted with public power remain answerable to the sovereign citizens they serve, turning constitutional promises into tangible integrity. The public accountability system should enable public sector organizations to demonstrate three important attributes – competence, reliability, and honesty.

 

For achieving sustainable economic growth and social cohesion, Governance with high standards is essential. Public Accountability is foundational catalyst for good governance. Public Accountability deals with publics and indicates how the aspects of governance trusted with public resources are answerable and responsible for their entrusted act for betterment of public and nation itself. This article examines the concept of public accountability, why public accountability is essential, who is responsible for it and what makes the public accountability as most important catalyst for good governance. Furthermore, it highlights on Public Accountability in context of Nepal along with policy recommendations and pathways for its enhancement and effectiveness ensuring reinforcement of independent oversight mechanisms within Nepal's federal structure.  

 

Key Words

Public, Public Accountability, transparency, integrity, Good Governance, Public Administration, , sustainability, participation, propriety audit, Public Accounts Committee, Auditor General.

 

Introduction                                  

A Good Governance is the primary determinant of nation's economic performance and the holistic well-being of its citizens. An efficient public administration does not merely exist to manage resources but to serve the evolving needs of individuals and businesses through a framework of trust. Governance, more specifically, Public Governance describes the architectural distribution of authority within a governmental system and the mechanisms through which those charged with such authority are held to account.

 

According to the OECD, the internationally recognized principles of good governance include:

 

  • Accountability: The obligation to identify and hold public officials responsible for their actions and decisions.
  • Transparency: The consistent availability of reliable, relevant, and timely information regarding government activities.
  • Openness: A commitment to inclusive governance by listening to citizens and integrating their feedback into policy framing and implementation (https://www.oecd.org).

 

Public accountability must be viewed as an active catalyst—the force that converts transparency into tangible public trust. While traditional governance focuses on Regularity (following the law), modern high-standard governance requires Propriety, which scrutinizes the wisdom, necessity, and ethical standing of every administrative act.

 

Historically, the concept of accountability is closely related to accounting basically from bookkeeping. Nowadays, accountability has moved beyond its bookkeeping origin and comes in many shapes and sizes. It has become a symbol for good governance, both in the public and in the private sector. In modern political discourse, accountability’ and ‘accountable’ no longer convey a stuffy image of bookkeeping and financial administration, but they hold strong promises of fair and equitable governance. It holds the promise of equity and justice, of learning and improvement, of transparency and democratic oversight, and of integrity and ethical appropriateness. Accountability has become an icon for good governance (Mark Bovens).

 

Public Accountability is the principle that those who hold positions of public trust such as elected officials and government agencies are answerable for their actions and decisions to the citizens they serve. The basic concept can be described as:

 

Who are publics?

 

Publics are groups of individuals, and the public is the totality of such groupings.

Under the concept of public accountability, the word public refers to at least two different features. First as openness i.e. accessible to citizens and secondly refers to the public sector. First feature requires transparency and answerability to citizens. Second feature refers to the public managers, on officials spending public money, exercising public authority, or managing a corporate body under public law in context of public accountability.

 

As defined under Right to Information Act 2064, Sec 2(a), public body covers the following body and institutions:

 

  • A body/ under the constitution/ established by an Act/ formed by the Government of Nepal.
  • Institution or foundation established by the law, public service.
  • Political Party or organization registered under the preventing law.
  • Body Corporate under the full or partial ownership or under control of the Government of Nepal or such body receiving grants from the Government of Nepal.
  • Body Corporate formed by a Body established by the Government of Nepal or the law upon entering into an agreement,
  • Non-Governmental Organization/Institutions operated by obtaining money directly or indirectly from the Government of Nepal or Foreign Government or International Organizations/Institutions,
  • Any other Body or Institution prescribed as Public Body by the Government of Nepal by publishing notice in the Gazette.

 

As basic feature of public, public bodies as defined above are responsible for public accountability.

 

 

 

What does accountability mean?

World Bank defines accountability as ' the obligation of power-holders to account for or take responsibility for their actions '. Accountability is the obligation to present an account of and answer for the execution of responsibilities through the political and constitutional structure related to ethics and governance. Symbolically, it is represented as:

 

Accountability = ƒ (answerability + responsibility)

 

What comes under Public Accountability

Public accountability is the hallmark of modern democratic governance. As intrinsic to democracies, citizens can choose public officials through their popular vote and accordingly exercise some control and oversight over the officials. When the public's power is entrusted to others, it is the demand of constitutional and fiduciary principle that those entrusted with public power are accountable to the public for the exercise of their trust. The trust entrusted with public officials refers to use of public resources and fulfillment of fiscal and social responsibilities they are assigned to and this sort of responsibilities comes under public accountability.

 

It holds the promise of equity and justice, of learning and improvement, of transparency and democratic oversight, and of integrity and ethical appropriateness. It covers all the three organs of the state namely legislature, Judiciary and Executive.

 

Public sector consists of government (whole of the governments in the federal system) plus legislative and judicial bodies together with the entities which are created by the constitutional and legal provisions. Public accountability is about the public sector demonstrating competence, reliability, and honesty in its use of the public’s money and resources.

 

According to the framework established by Bovens (2007) (article: Analysing and assessing accountability: A conceptual framework), public accountability functions through a three-stage cycle:

 

 

For accountability to act as a catalyst for good governance, the relationship between the public official (the actor) and the oversight body or citizen (the forum) must pass through these phases in most effective and efficient way.

 

 

 

 

Who is responsible for public accountability?

 

The traditional concept of accountability limits responsibility to "the government," encompassing both elected officials and civil servants who are expected to answer for their actions. However, in twenty-first-century governance, the simple question of “Who is accountable?” has become increasingly difficult to answer due to the "Problem of Many Hands." In modern governance—particularly in federal or decentralized systems where a single public project involves a network of multiple agencies, private contractors, and tiers of government—the chain of accountability frequently becomes fragmented.

 

To prevent responsibility from being diluted, a robust governance framework must explicitly map obligations across three distinct pillars of actors and institutions:

 

Political Actors (Elected Officials): Ministers, legislators, and local government executives (such as mayors or councilors) bear political accountability. They are responsible for high-level policy formulation, budget approval, and ensuring public initiatives align with core public values like equity, fairness, and transparency. They answer directly to the citizens via elections.

 

Administrative Actors (Civil Servants and Public Managers): Department heads, chief administrative officers, and project directors bear administrative and financial accountability. They are legally and operationally responsible for procurement integrity, day-to-day execution, and ensuring that the means and ends of public expenditure are legally and ethically justified.

 

Oversight Institutions (Independent Watchdogs): Independent statutory bodies—such as supreme audit institutions, supreme courts, anti-corruption commissions, and ombudsman offices—are responsible for external legal accountability. They hold both politicians and bureaucrats liable for systemic, financial, or ethical failures.

 

Why public accountability?

Because of the need for a trusted relationship between the public sector and the public, public accountability as catalyst for good governance is must. It is about the public sector demonstrating its competence, reliability, and honesty in a way that allows the public to judge the trustworthiness of the public sector in using public money and resources.

 

Public accountability acts as a preventative shield against corruption. When individuals and organizations lack honesty and transparency, corruption grows. This erodes public trust, weakens democracy, and slows down a country's development leading to inequality, poverty and social injustice. It impacts on enjoyment of basic human rights. Therefore, accountability is more than just a rule; it is a vital tool to ensure that those in power are answerable for their choices. By managing public money wisely and ethically, we can restore people's confidence in the government and ensure that resources are used fairly for everyone.

 

Public Accountability in Nepal

 

The landscape of public accountability in Nepal has undergone a radical transformation, moving from a traditional system of "upward accountability" toward the Monarch, to a modern "downward accountability" toward the sovereign people. This shift was not merely political but structural. With the transition to a Federal Democratic Republic and the subsequent promulgation of the Constitution of Nepal, accountability was repositioned as a fundamental right of the citizen rather than a discretionary gift of the state.

 

Before examining the specific legal statutes, it is essential to recognize that Nepal’s contemporary framework is built on the principle of Fiduciary Trust. In this model, the state acts as a trustee of public resources, and the Constitution serves as the primary deed of that trust. This evolution reflects a growing global consensus that the legitimacy of a government is determined not just by how it gains power, but by how it accounts for the exercise of that power. Consequently, the constitutional and political framework of Nepal has been designed to institutionalize transparency and answerability across all levels of governance.

 

  1. Constitutional framework

The Constitution of Nepal serves as the supreme guarantor of public accountability. Nepal's Constitution provides the right to communication under Article 19 and Right to information under Article 27 which empowers citizens to demand transparency seeking basis for information. These rights impose a mandatory duty upon public officials to explain their conduct, justify administrative choices, and take responsibility for outcomes.

 

Structurally, the state is built upon the principles of separation of powers and a robust system of checks and balances. To operationalize this oversight, the Federal Parliament utilizes some specialized committees. Most notable is the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which exercises rigorous oversight over public finances and reviews the implementation of recommendations made by constitutional bodies.

Figure 2: constitutional basis of accountability (Article: The Prospect of Accountability in Local Governance in Nepal BY Hari P. Dhungana}

 

The diagram illustrates a closed-loop accountability system powered by the People, who delegate authority to the Federal, Provincial, and Local Legislatures through elections (dashed lines). In return, all three tiers of government remain directly accountable to the citizens (solid lines) for their performance. To navigate federal decentralization, Local Governments are structurally required to align their operations (block arrows) with federal and provincial frameworks. Finally, to ensure strict checks and balances, citizens delegate direct oversight (red line) to the Judiciary and Federal Oversight Agencies (such as the CIAA and OAG), which act as independent watchdogs to enforce legal and financial liability across all governing bodies.

 

  1. Institutional Oversight and the Political Mandate

The political framework for accountability is anchored in the sovereign right of citizens to deliver a collective verdict through periodic elections. Beyond the ballot box, the Constitution establishes independent oversight bodies with high professional integrity, primarily:

 

  1. The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA): To curb corruption and administrative malpractice.
  2. The Auditor General: To ensure fiscal discipline and propriety across all public agencies.

 

These independent bodies along with others looks after the working of the executives and report directly to the President, who then submits these findings to Parliament. This ensures that the people's representatives can scrutinize and review the executive’s performance ensuring ethical and professional integrity.

 

  1. Legislative and Executive Mechanisms

To ensure the implementation of constitutional provisions into practices, comprehensive suite of laws has been enacted and various executive agencies for direct vigilance has been established.  Major of them has been listed below:

 

Table 1: Key Legal Instruments for Accountability

Domain

Primary Legislation (B.S. / A.D.)

Integrity & Anti-Corruption

·CIAA Act, 2048 (1991);

·Prevention of Corruption Act, 2059 (2002)

Fiscal Governance

·Financial Procedures Act, 2055 (1999);

·Audit Act, 2075 (2018)

Transparency

·Right to Information Act, 2064 (2007);

·Good Governance Act, 2064 (2008)

Civil Standards

·Civil Service Act, 2049 (1992);

·Consumer Protection Act, 2054 (1998)

Market & Finance

·Public Procurement Act, 2063 (2007);

·Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2070 (2013)

 

Table 2: Executive Agencies and Monitoring Tools

These entities ensure real-time monitoring and enforce the "answerability" of public officials:

  • Oversight Agencies:
  1. The National Vigilance Centre (NVC),
  2. Public Procurement Monitoring Office (PPMO), and
  3. the Department of Revenue Investigation (DRI).
  • Social Accountability Tools:
  1. Mandatory Citizen’s Charters,
  2. Public Hearings, and
  3. Social Audits that allow for direct community oversight.
  • Grievance Redressal:
  1. A centralized complaint-handling system (including the PMO’s Hello Sarkar) and
  2. the mandatory appointment of Information Officers.
  • Compliance Measures:
  1. Annual Income and Asset Disclosure for public officials and
  2. formal Contract Agreements with performance-based indicators.

(Source:https://dms.nasc.org.np/sites/default/files/documents/Public%20Accountability%20in%20Nepalese%20Context)

 

These legal and institutional arrangements set procedures, allocate responsibilities for greater transparency, creating fairness in public procurement, adopting accountability tools, and reporting and disclosure requirements.

 

  1. Challenges

The major challenges a Nepalese society is facing is the implementation gap of these prescribed policies. There is no doubt that Nepal has strong legal and institutional provision, however the poor implementation has caused the poor public accountability. The reason behind this situation is ineffective political and administrative system, transparency issues in relation to recruitment of public positions, frequent changes in key officials, slow, selective and lengthy enforcement system of legal provisions, lack of proper implementation of financial and integrated management system, lack of transparency and fairness in public disclosure and delivery of public services etc. In this regard, we all are well known about recent and painful incident of Nepal occurred on 8th and 9th September 2025 (Bhadra 2082) when youth-led demonstrations against corruption, weak service delivery and restrictions on digital freedoms spread rapidly from Kathmandu to other urban centers.

 

The protests led to loss of life, hundreds of injuries and prolonged disruption of livelihoods and education. Buildings housing all three formal pillars of the state the legislature, the executive and the judiciary were attacked or set on fire, and even the premises of key integrity institutions were damaged in expressions of public anger.  These events did not occur in isolation but aroused due to irregularities in delivery of public services, lack of public accountability and more importantly lack of transparency and openness to citizens along with restriction in right to information of public citizens that has been a fundamental rights as provisioned in Constitutions of Nepal.  The severity of these issues is reflected in international data. According to the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) released by Transparency International, Nepal scored 34 out of 100 and ranked 109th out of 180 countries, indicating a high level of public sector corruption and zero improvement from the previous year highlighting that public sector corruption remains a massive hurdle to the nation's progress.. (https://www.transparency.org).

 

  1. Policy recommendations and Pathways

 

The systemic crisis and social unrest of 2025 serve as a definitive "wake-up call" for the Nepalese state. They prove that having a sophisticated legal framework is meaningless if it does not translate into honesty, fairness, and visible results for the citizenry. To move beyond the current "Implementation Gap," Nepal must shift from Symbolic Accountability—the act of simply having laws—to Substantive Accountability, where those laws carry real consequences.

 

The following policy recommendations provide a strategic pathway to transform public accountability from a static concept into a dynamic catalyst for national integrity:

 

  1. Institutionalizing the "Consequences Phase"

Regarding Triple-Stage Accountability Cycle, Nepal effectively executes the 'Informing' phase but it faces systemic deficits in enforcing. For this improvement, the pathway may be integration of Audit Act 2075 with the Civil Service Act with establishment of Automatic Administrative Sanctions such that Audit findings directly link to the performance of responsible officials with provision of immediate punishment or reward.

 

  1. Digital Transparency & Proactive Disclosure

A shift from Reactive to Proactive Disclosure with implementation of Real Time Open Data Dashboards for all public procurement and infrastructure projects is required to address the "Lack of Transparency" that fueled recent youth-led protests. As pathway to this, instead of waiting for citizens to file an RTI request, the government should practice Proactive Disclosure and initiate digitization of all public servicies in real time to the extent possible. This "Open-Book" approach reduces the opportunity for corruption and honors the constitutional Right to Information.

 

 

 

  1. Protecting Administrative Stability

The "Frequent changes in key officials" noted as a major challenge must be addressed to preserve institutional memory. For this, establishing fixed tenure for heads of enforcing institutions with a mechanism of creating a "Legal Shield" that prevents the Executive from transferring officials before their term ends, unless there is a proven case of misconduct can be initiated.

 

 

 

  1. Enhancing Social Accountability (The Citizen’s Voice)

Prevention of fiduciary trust is most to prevent future unrest and for this government must provide a peaceful, legal channel for addressing public dissatisfactions. Social Audits and Public Hearings shall be legally binding for all local projects such that act of propriety shall be compulsorily followed and The provision of disclosure regarding the social and public hearings in auditors report shall be made mandatory and if the audit reveals failure of propriety, further investigation shall be triggered immediately.

 

  1. Strengthen the executives’ agencies specially PAC

The public accounts committee shall be empowered as independent authority to seek legal remedies so that the "Accountability loop" is closed ensuring that the legislature is not ignored by the executive.

Capacity development and knowledge sharing of employees and members of such committees shall be promoted so as to understand the core issue and tackle them tactfully.

 

  1. Regularize public audit

Audit provides oversight on over and above the internal accountability system of the executive, insight service to assist auditees and other decision makers by assessing the progress of program and policies, which in turns helps to review and adjust polices and program. It provides a fair description of problems and weaknesses, their impact and responsibilities with useful recommendations. Likewise, Public audit provides the services of oversight, insight and foresight functions to accomplish the corrective actions on timely manner.

 

The Constitution of Nepal 2072 and the Audit Act 2075 establish the Office of the Auditor General as the Supreme Audit Institution of the country, mandated to audit all government offices in accordance with the law, with due regard to regularity, economy, efficiency, effectiveness, and propriety and performance audits of subject matters having high significance and public interest. As the matter of fact the Office of the Auditor General is not responsible for every dimension of Nepal’s governance challenges. However, it plays a crucial role in one area that citizens care deeply about: how public money is raised, managed and spent so as to ensure effectiveness of public accountability and smooth delivery of public services. Each and every aspect of nation shall act rationally and be responsible for the way they act as entrusted officials.

 

By ensuring that every stage of the accountability cycle—Informing, Debating, and Consequences—is functional, Nepal can bridge the implementation gap and fulfill its constitutional promise of a fair and transparent state.

 

Conclusion

 

The public accountability system plays a fundamental role in maintaining the public’s trust and confidence in the public sector. Limited transparency, integrity and lack of accountability at the individual, professional or organizational level leads to corruption, undermines governmental capacity for service delivery and hampers the implementation of important reforms that is why the public accountability has been considered as major catalyst for good governance. As a tool to measure answerability and responsibility, public accountability is essential in building trust and confidence ensuring prudent economy.

 

 

Public participation, openness and transparency and effective functioning of public sector ensures the fair and transparent system and hence promotes the public accountability. Hence, being accountable for the responsibilities entrusted with is only the way to good governance and we as responsible citizen shall start from our one boundaries to work for it so that misuse of public resources becomes more difficult, more visible and less acceptable.

 

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