Austerity has placed English public services under considerable strain (Ferry and Murphy, 2017), with local government budgets experiencing over 60% reductions (LGA, 2015) and the main regimes for assessing local government performance have been disestablished. Holding public services to account is often purported to be a key purpose of performance management, particularly within a New Public Management perspective (Put and Bouckaert, 2011).
Even as new models of public governance emerge, the same questions endure: how do citizens hold public services accountable for delivery? Services theory has facilitated the isolation and examination of a public-services dominant logic (Osborne et al., 2013) and co-creation of value (or destruction) (Osborne et al., 2016).
These have been fruitful avenues, yet their focus has often been on the mechanisms for service production. This risks homogenizing accountability and reducing its effectiveness: public governance at the community or higher levels focuses on the citizenry, or demos, whereas approaches to analysing co-creation risk over-emphasising the dyadic nature of service, thus reducing the focus to individual service interactions, or aggregations thereof. Recent developments exploring systemic and involuntary participation (e.g. Osborne et al., 2014) are welcome, but more research is needed to understand how citizens, customers, service-users, and other roles played (Thomas, 2012) interact to allow accountability practices to be negotiated.
Accountability often rests on principal/agent theory (Lindberg, 2013), and multiple types of accountability have been posited (Romzek, 2000; Sinclair, 1995). This paper draws on qualitative research in English local government to consider a model of multiple accountabilities and outlines ways they are enacted whilst challenging the orthodoxy of principal/agent theory.
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Accounting and accountability of value creation in innovative public service delivery arra
