oted that the concept of accountability had emerged as a form of “institutionalized accountability” in which the agents (i.e., property holders) were required to render a count of what they possessed in the realm of principal (i.e., the king). Thus, in its original meaning, ‘accountability’ was closer in meaning to the modern word “accounting” or “bookkeeping,” which suggests a record of financial information (Bovens, 2006: 6).
The meaning of accountability has completely changed over time. First, based on the end-means continuum, the term implies more than just a means. It has begun to become a fundamental requirement of good governance, which is closely connected to the ultimate end of government. This leads the term to encompass numerous public values such as “transparency, equity, efficiency, responsiveness, responsibility, and integrity” (Nabatchi et al., 2015: 139). Second, the accounting relationship has completely reversed from account-taking to account-giving (Bovens, 2006). Accountability now refers to “the authorities themselves who are being held accountable by their citizens” rather than “sovereigns holding their subjects to account” (Bovens, 2006: 6).
The conceptual shift from financial accounting to “public accountability” was aligned with the rise of the accountability movement away from the traditional public administration model to the NPM model. As a result, the actual shift was from a notion of financial accounting to a broader notion of “management accountability,” but the new concept was narrow in scope as it referred primarily to inspection, audit, evaluation, and assessment (Tilbury, 2006). This change brought about two major problems. First, “public accountability” was used interchangeably with “management accountability.” Consequently, accountability in NPM agendas was often misused as “both an instrument and a goal” (Bovens, 2006: 7). Even though the concept of management accountability was more likely to mean instruments effective at addressing the problems of public governance, it has, over time, been used to represent a norm of good governance. While the focus of NPM was mainly on accountability “mechanisms” as policy instruments and tools, its accountability was often mistakenly seen as a “virtue.” Second, the concept
