Development jargon decoded: accountability

This week's foray into development parlance examines why accountability comes equipped with bulging biceps and a neck thicker than most people's thighs
Brian Shaw
Hulking, vast, titanic … it's either Brian Shaw, the world's strongest man – or accountability. Photograph: Victor Fraile/Getty Images

Age: Depends what you mean by accountability. The word "accountable", derived from the Old French acont, has been knocking around since before 1387. As for "accountability", the earliest use of the term quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1794, when Samuel Williams – establishing what would become a time-honoured theme – bemoaned a lack of it in his work The Natural and Civil History of Vermont. But it's only over the past couple of decades or so that the development community – along with just about every other Tom, Dick and Harry – has appropriated it.

Appearance: Vast. Colossal. Mountainous. Imagine Brian Shaw, the world's strongest man, whose biceps have a circumference of two feet and whose neck is apparently thicker than most people's thighs. Only bigger. And without a face that has "the bulbous charm of a potato carving".

Er, we are still talking about a development term, right? Yes, but this isn't just any old development term. This is a monolithic, Brobdingnagian, lycra-clad, sinews-straining-at-the-seams development term.

And there was I thinking it was just a word. So presumably it has some special meaning I should know about? Accountability means everything and nothing, although you could say it's the definition of irony.

Why? Because people are for ever telling us that jargon gets in the way of accountability.

And what's wrong with that? So long as you overlook the minor detail that "accountability" has become one of the biggest jargon buzzwords going, nothing.

Oh. Who else uses it then? Who doesn't? Politicians, economists, businesses, civil society groups, the media – accountability has become more sought after than Jennifer Lawrence.

Would I regret asking why that's a problem? Only if you find anything untoward in the suggestion that different notions of accountability are "potentially overlapping, multilayered, and multidimensional"(pdf), and have therefore created a "polysemantic concept" that poses the danger of a "byzantine conceptual nightmare". So that'll probably be a yes.

You mean it's possible to get all that from a single word? It is when that word has to shoulder the conceptual burden heaped on "accountability".

And what conceptual burden might that be? The one that comes when ideas are ascribed to a term that range far beyond its ostensible meaning. Back in 1859, when John Stuart Mill wrote of "the accountability of governments to the people", it would have been broadly obvious what he meant. But accountability is no longer just about governments being answerable; with political power often shared with non-governmental actors, devolved to local and regional level, or even shared globally, accountability has become infinitely more complex. What's more, as is often pointed out, accountability isn't just about being responsible for something that's been done – it also implies some action can be taken. And sanction is only one of the four sequential stages of accountability outlined in a briefing note for the UK's Department for International Development (pdf).

Crikey, four? Yep. Sanction is preceded by standard-setting, investigation and answerability. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. We haven't even mentioned the different types of accountability (pdf): upward (lower ranks answering to higher), downward (higher to lower), vertical (imposed from without, for instance by an election), horizontal (self-imposed), hybrid (a mix of civil society and the state), domestic (all the aforementioned), mutual (think donors and recipients), outward (where national actors are accountable to external development partners), social ("society-driven horizontal accountability") and even diagonal (pdf).

That sounds like more than any six-syllable word could possibly cope with. Or a byzantine conceptual nightmare, perhaps.

Indeed. But let's assume headache pills are readily at hand – is all this diversity of meaning necessarily a bad thing? If it encourages deeper engagement with the issues surrounding accountability, maybe not. But when a term becomes overladen with meaning, there's always a risk it'll become too ambiguous to be useful at all. Think how close the words "refute" and "repudiate" came to the semantic scrapheap after that unprovoked assault by Sarah Palin back in 2010. They were preserved for future generations only by the quick thinking of New Oxford American Dictionary lexicographers, who rapidly made "refudiate" a real word.

Surely accountability isn't in danger of becoming Paliniated from the development lexicon?! There's no way of telling for sure. But the World Bank cautions (pdf) that accountability is "an amorphous concept that is difficult to define in precise terms".

So we should rule nothing out? When it comes to accountability, that seems to happen anyway.

Do say: "Accountability involves an obligation to demonstrate that work has been conducted in compliance with agreed rules and standards."

Don't say: "My accountability has gone semantically overdrawn in a major way."