Accountability Communities

Description

Kanishka Jayasuriya:

"I would like to point to the growing importance of legitimacy within regulatory structures, which I have already touched on in relation to the notion of systemic regulation. At a conceptual level I have developed the notion of the accountability communities as a framework to understand the constitution of public authority within transnational regulatory regimes. Accountability communities are complex, and they are composed of public and/or private organizations endowed with capacities to perform legislative, monitoring, and compliance activities in specific functionally based regulatory regimes both within and beyond national boundaries. They operate through institutional forms such as deliberative forums, markets, or network mechanisms. Furthermore, by virtue of particular understandings of the discourses of accountability that bind various actors together, these communities enable the location and identification of public authority, not to mention the ‘public’ to which account is given within regulatory regimes (see 2008a; and 2008b). In this way, an accountability community defines public authority within regulatory regimes and provides the basis on which new forms of state and market-making are created. These accountability communities are crucial not only to the transnationalization of the state but also to the very nature of politics, which they effectively shape." (http://www.criticalglobalisation.com/Issue3/127_138_INTERVIEW_JAYASURIYA_JCGS3.pdf)