Administrative Organisation and the Welfare State: Wicked Issues and the Challenges of Accountability, Legitimacy and Coordination

The workshop’s main topic revolves around the dynamics between legitimacy, accountability and administrative organization in modern welfare states. Political legitimacy is a precondition for the sustainability of the welfare state, and the workshop aims to address how recent welfare state reforms have affected political and democratic governance and the relationship between the state and its citizens. Such reforms have aimed at the establishment of managerial accountability, independent, 'non-majoritarian' agencies and overlapping jurisdictions, neglecting the critical issue of how to develop mechanisms for political accountability and legitimacy. New Public Management reforms as well as post-NPM reform initiatives have affected the balance between managerial, legal and political accountability across welfare sectors and countries, but also other accountability relations, such as administrative, professional, social and market accountability are affected. This has created confusion over to whom public organizations are accountable. To what extent has it been possible to combine the various modes of accountability? How, why, for what and to whom are public organizations in the various welfare services held accountable? How has all this affected political legitimacy? The challenges of multiple accountability relations and the relationship between accountability and input as well as output legitimacy will be focused. Accountability challenges are especially challenging for wicked problems and transboundary issues that are at the same time highly complex, contested and ambiguous, transcending organizations, policy sectors, administrative levels and time frames, like poverty, unemployment, social cohesion and immigration. These issues become even more salient now governments are faced with budgetary scarcity, Europeanization and globalisation. One objective of the workshop is to search and identify innovative coordination practices and related steering instruments in European public sectors, to analyze the functioning and accountability of such coordination practices, and to assess their value in countering public sector fragmentation and loss of legitimacy.