Paper short abstract:

Accountability practices feature prominently in soft Policy Instruments applied eg. in (urban) sustainability governance such as action plans, roadmaps, or awards. I argue that these protypes of techno-managerialism might have a transformative potential by encouraging “the political”.

Paper long abstract:

Accountability practices are corner stones of current Policies. They feature prominently in soft Policy Instruments commonly applied eg. in (urban) sustainability governance such as action plans, roadmaps, or awards.

In these and other instruments accountability practices feature in a twofold way. On the one hand, they are put to work to achieve eg. set reduction goals. They are used as enabling governance practices for example in Strategic Energy Action Plans, where various urban stakeholders are held accountable through reporting schemes. On the other hand, Policy Instruments themselves and those working with them are being held accountable or at least, efforts in this direction are made, since one characteristic of soft instruments is that they generally defy evaluative quantifications.

Research partners from different administrative and political branches consider Action Plans, Awards and Actions Weeks as transformative. They are being scaled up and down and are emphatically promoted. Taking stock at current sustainability governance, business as usual is still prevailing.

From a practice theoretical informed perspective, I argue that policy instruments are generally neither transformative nor stabilizing. Depending on the situation I argue that Policy Instruments, have the potential to be transformative due to their political character.

I would like to share how Policy Instruments that are considered prototypes of techno-managerialism might unfold a transformative potential by encouraging “the political”, and how it might look like re-imagining and re-narrating accountability practices. The basis for this is fieldwork in which I followed six Instruments through three post-industrial EU European cities and beyond.

Paper short abstract:

Re-imaging accountability practices in the malfunctioning Dutch care system for unsafe families is preceded, and should be nurtured, by the confrontation with pain caused by the current system; pain as a source that boosts transformation and reflects on accountability practices for the future.

Paper long abstract:

The current Dutch system of care for unsafe families is composed of a variety of institutions that have to comply with different and an increasing number of, organization focused, accountability practices. These practices  are designed to monitor the tasks of each separate organisation instead of the whole system around the people concerned.  This is a problem since this current individually focused system doesn’t provide sufficient quality of care for people living in unsafe family situations. This insight has led to a new scenario for the future.  

  Encounters with professionals, boardmembers and local authorities, collaborating in living labs, made clear that they believe in the promise of the scenario. At the same time the lack of insight on everyone's own share in the malfunctioning system and of conducive conditions causes 'defaulting‘ into the old system. A clear need was found for different accountability practices, practices that boost transformative power of families, professionals, organisations and authorities.

To boost the transformative power and support these living labs in fostering transformation new accountability practices are needed that challenge the various people involved to embrace disconcertment and reflect on embodied sensibilities towards multiple accountabilities. Our hypothesis is that this needs to be preceded by the individual and collective assignment to (repeatedly) feel and deeply understand the pain and unintended effects of their involvement in the families they care for. Only when the urgency to transform is painfully felt and continuously nurtured, a start can be made to reflect on meaningful accountability practices for the future. 

Paper short abstract:

In this workshop, we invite (all!) engaged researchers to participate in a re-connection journey (1) to what it means and feels to be a transdisciplinary and transformative researcher and (2) to what that implies for accountability practices in academia.

Paper long abstract:

In this workshop, we invite (all!) engaged researchers to participate in a re-connection journey (1) to what it means and feels to be a transdisciplinary and transformative researcher and (2) to what that implies for accountability practices in academia. Many transdisciplinary researchers grapple with ambivalent and epistemic grounding with care in the constructed fields of science, society and self. This workshops envisions to collectively feel grounded and supported in transdisciplinary and transformative endeavours as researchers. This workshop is intended to fuel a looking inward and looking outward dialectic.

In the first part of our workshop, we focus on the embodiment of being/becoming transdisciplinary and transformative. This is about looking inward, while looking outward.

In a second part of the workshop, we explore what this implies for the way you, as a researcher, want to be held accountable for your actions, and by whom: looking outward, while looking inward. We critically engage with the issue of accountability in relation to the transformative and transdisciplinary research and engaged methodologies. We conceive of accountability practices as ‘world making practices and narratives’, having the potential to create and generate purpose-full transformative (administrative) practices and disrupt counterproductive institutionalized practices.

We invite for creative imagination and materialization of innovative accountability practices (e.g. meaningful measurements, reflexive standards) for the governance of transdisciplinary and transformative research.

Paper short abstract:

In this study, we demonstrate how the emerging equity-centered data initiatives in US local governments experiment with relational knowledge and accountability models discussed in feminist and anti-colonial STS. We discuss their effects in decentralizing the institutional power of knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

With its symbolic valence of objectivity and legitimacy in societies, data is often considered useful in accountability processes among groups. But what if the assumptions no longer hold among communities of practice? How is data’s role in public decision-making redefined when groups aim to put data work for other social values like equity or justice?

In our current study, we investigate how practitioners in US local governance navigate the questions above in equity-centered data initiatives in state and city governments. Amid renewed public discourse on social justice, these initiatives have invited various actors, including government agencies, NGOs, and their partnering tech vendors, to come up with different forms of alternative knowledge practices: some developed indicators to measure “equity level” while others created novel databases for local knowledge and lived experiences. New digital interfaces were designed to mediate the conflicting realities of stakeholders.

Analyzing our interviews and ethnographic engagements with the organizations, we notice that these interventions, despite their differences, commonly elevate the relationality constituting urban lives. They used digital technologies to document historic relations among the actors and redefine data as a medium/subject of negotiation. Situating the observations in the feminist and anticolonial discourse of power and knowledge, we suggest that these emerging practices experiment with the relational knowledge and accountability model. Asking how these experiments decentralize the power to knowledge in government institutions, we discuss the transformative power of relational data practices to facilitate larger structural shifts toward spatial and social justice.