Public Accountability in Transgovernmental Networks

Globalisation spurs collaboration between governmental actors at all institutional levels. This includes the technical levels. In the last decades, at this level transgovernmental networks (TGNs) are established. This type of governance is informal as it lacks a clear mandate, is exclusive as it invites a small group of participants and creates an additional organizational level in which national civil servants participate. It creates the potential to create policies with counterparts from different institutional backgrounds, with the ultimate aim to solve societal problems, often related with globalisation such as waste management or banking supervision. TGNs operate at a distance from the national state and as such this development could lead to conflicting loyalties of participants. These reasons have led scholars to perceive a lack of accountability of these networks in the traditional sense, i.e. from national civil servants to elected politicians at the level on which the competence lies on a particular policy field. However, a proper explanatory framework to discuss this problem is missing. This article will fill this gap by developing a typology based on the work on varieties of networks by Provan and Kenis (2008) and Slaughter (2004). This innovative framework helps us to formulate expectations on how variations in TGNs affect accountability relationships between national civil servants participating in TGNs and civil servants and elected politicians at ‘home’, i.e. at the national level. To show the added value of this framework for understanding the effect of TGNs on the principles and practices of democratic accountability within national states, we assess the expectations by discussing empirical findings on four distinct cases of TGNs.