Public Budgeting

Abstract:

Introduction:

Undoubtedly, it will be right to assume that every facet of the public life is greatly influenced by management actions of the governing authorities. Tagged as the ruling authority in most cases, government organizes and runs the actions of the public sector through bureaucratic channels. These so-called channels are tagged with the responsibility of administering and implementing governmental policies to the citizens as well as other stakeholders. This form of managing public resources and interests through bureaucratic governmental networks is known as public administration (Kettl & Fesler, 2009).

To put simply, public administration involves the examination of public bodies and their impacts on society and the global world. It assesses the manner in which public agencies are managed, how government programs are designed and implemented and how these bodies relate with each other. In addition, public administrators are involved at all levels of government (home and abroad), where they manage nonprofit organizations as well as interest groups of all kinds (Denhardt and Denhardt 2009). Notably, public managers are seen working in different sectors of government and public affairs, ranging from "defense and national security to social welfare and environmental quality, from design and construction of roads and bridges to the exploration of space, and from taxation and financial administration to human resources management (Denhardt and Denhardt 2009). All bodies seek to serve public interests and policy issues pertaining to government. However, there's none more important than a commitment to public service (Denhardt and Denhardt 2009), in other words, effective management of government programs and public resources is usually given the highest priority.

However, as public administration machinery expands and becomes more complex, the need for its accountability is more acutely felt. In a democratic government, there's a general assumption that the public servants work in the government for the people. As a result, the problem of locating accountability becomes critical due to the nature of the job performed and actions carried out by the public officials.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the characteristics of administrative accountability in public administration. But first, it is necessary to clarify the concept of accountability and its possible dimensions and forms in relation to public administration. A look at the challenges of administrative accountability in most public organizations and conclude with the consideration of a practical reform of administrative accountability.

The Concept of Accountability

The foundations of public administration basically rely on the concept of accountability and this is always a challenge for management as it raises immediate questions for the one held to account, accountable to whom? For what? And how? (Romzek 2000). Traditionally, the understanding of accountability has been closely linked to the idea of "giving an account," in other words, explaining and justifying one's actions, and the idea of top-down control in an administrative hierarchy (Stone 2005). However, accountability is basically achieved through the mechanisms, strategies, and procedures created to effectively communicate role expectations between authoritative groups and public administrators. But first, what do we mean by accountability? In its simplest form, accountability refers to any situation in which individuals who exercise power are constrained by external means such as dismissal, judicial review, and reversal of decisions (McKinney and Howard 1998). That is, public administrators must be aware of whom they are accountable and for what they are accountable. For the UN's own administration, accountability has been defined as the "obligation on the part of public officials to report on the usage of public resources and answerability for failing to meet stated performance objectives" (Armstrong 2005). Thus, a state with high level of accountability in the public sector, there's bound to be proper and appropriate use of available resources.

The term, accountability has been extended to include concerns for long-term management issues and public sector performance. In a narrower use of the term, "accountability generally refers to a broad spectrum of public expectations dealing with organizational performance, responsiveness, and even morality of government and nonprofit organizations" (Kearns 1996). A broader definition of the term by Behn (2001), "include not only financial accountability, accountability for fairness (democratic governance), and accountability for performance." Similarly, Thomas (2003) referred to the term as one less tied to formal reporting relationships, which encompasses an organizational commitment to transparency, to responsiveness to clients or citizens, and to democratic values. However, adapting the simplest definition by Romzek and Dubnick (1987), accountability can be defined as the satisfaction of legitimate expectations about the use of administrative discretion, or the legitimization of discretion.

As the concept of public administration evolved over the years, performance and accountability measures have become the primary concern and central focus of public managers and administrators (Gibson, Lacy, and Dougherty n.d.). Public servants are accountable for their decisions and actions to the public and must relinquish themselves to whatever scrutiny is appropriate to their offices (Armstrong 2005). For instance, in Westminster systems, accountability is used in parliamentary terms, in which the minister is accountable for all the actions of his or her department (Peters 2000).

Accountability has been a central problem for governments, which are or claim to be democratic. Specifically, in the public sector, it has been presented as evolving (Parker and Gould 1999; Sands 2004) in American public administration. It has been viewed as the hallmark of modern democratic governance and a central concept in public management (Bovens 2005; Dubnick 2005). In an important article, Romzek and Dubnick (1987) have argued that the traditional association of accountability with "answerability" is better understood in terms of the various "means by which public agencies and their workers manage the diverse expectations generated within and outside the organization" behavior. In other words, administrators and public agencies are accountable to a degree, where they are required to answer for their actions (Romzek and Dubnick 1987).

Nevertheless, public administrators are often faced with multiple, diverse, and changing expectations including conflicting