Governance as a Unifying Framework for Public Administration? 241
Democratic frame, accountability is “rendered” to elected offi cials, citizens, and
the courts. In the Market frame, shareholders/owners and consumers are the two
targets for accountability. Finally, in the Administrative frame, accountability is
left to principals, experts, and professionals, and collaborating peers or partners.
Th e framework is based on an examination of emergency management responses
following Hurricane Katrina and is viewed as the most appropriate system for
avoiding the “blame game” among government actors and fostering a collective
sense of the public interest. Underlying this theory of accountability, however,
is the assumption that all relevant actors can agree on basic notions of account-
ability and legitimacy. As others have shown, when the organization becomes
transnational and/or lacks strong sanctioning mechanisms, that assumption is
easily violated.
Jonathan Koppell (2008) brings the issue of accountability to governance in
international, or what he describes as global governance organizations (GGOs).
Such organizations as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and
the European Union all are “suff er[ing] from an accountability shortage” (177).
GGOs tend to lack formal or enforceable sanctioning mechanisms, making com-
pliance with authoritative requests diffi cult. Legitimacy takes on many forms, but
“cognitive legitimacy,” a focus on “the degree to which an institution is accepted,”
imposes the fewest costs on an organization in terms of the amount of resources
required to ensure compliance. Most GGOs, however, are unable to achieve such
legitimacy and instead focus on “normative legitimacy . . . a function of beliefs
about what entitles an individual or institution to wield power” (182). As Koppell
writes, “Legitimacy is essentially a psychological source of authority” (187), but
this psychological source tends to vary widely across peoples and cultures. By
defi ning legitimacy, and ultimately the source of power for GGOs, Koppell is able
to provide a foundation upon which global organizations should be held account-
able. Indeed, out of this focus on normative legitimacy comes a set of six prin-
ciples to which GGOs should adhere in order to retain some level of legitimacy:
representation, participation, equality (fairness or neutrality), constitutional basis
(rules and order), transparency, and a rational basis for decisions (191).
Th e dilemma, of course, is that perceptions regarding adherence to such
principles are likely to vary widely among actors in global governance systems.
Because perceptions of legitimacy vary across governmental and private actors,
perceptions of accountability also vary. For governance theory, the problem thus
becomes identifying the components, whether rules or structures, that provide
enough accountability to an adequate number of actors in a governance network
so as to ensure compliance (see also Berliner and Prakash 2012). For PPPs or gov-
ernance networks, it is diffi cult to apply democratic ideals, such as transparency
and a code of ethics. Private actors, as well as nonprofi t actors, bring diff erent sets
of values and ethics to the governing network.
Koppell’s work on global governance presents a new challenge to the gover-
nance framework. Most notably, diff erences exist in terms of the perceptions of