Paper short abstract:

We use ethnographic material from a project that curates dialogue between the various players in mental healthcare to unpick the impact of accountability, charting its role in promoting some aspects of caring at the expense of others.

Paper long abstract:

There is something interesting, if possibly reckless, about critiquing cultures of accountability in contexts such as psychiatric services where a lack of accountability may (just may) make the difference between life and death, harm and preservation from harm. Or so the trope goes.

Re:Create Psychiatry is a project that seeks to reform mental healthcare through dialogue. It did not set out to critique regimes of accountability. In fact, though aware from the outset of the figure of the NHS bureaucrat, it elected to abstract it from its conversations, focusing instead on the patient - clinician relationality, and overcoming the problem of patients and clinicians feeling unseen and unheard.

But … in sidestepping the shadowy figure of the bureaucrat, and carving out a non-transactional space where the various players in mental healthcare can come together to talk and listen as attentive equals, Re:Create found itself engaging with accountability. This is because as well as making the difference between life and death, accountability makes it difficult to talk. Accountability may be central to some aspects of caring, such as linking decisions to evidence, but it appears inimical to other aspects, such as being present, splitting open Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s tryptic of care as labour, affect and ethics. This paper presents an ethnographic account of the work of Re:Create Psychiatry, using it to investigate how accountability in mental healthcare impacts on relationality, care, trust and the possibility of open heartedness.

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic insights into an alternative food network, this paper draws attention to the re-appropriation of accountability practices for counterhegemonic agendas. It assesses the potential of a market-oriented global form to help undermine the very norms and logics of the market economy.

Paper long abstract:

Practices of audit culture are ubiquitous in the field of agri-food production and trade. However, as in any other domain of human activities, their effects are far from being always predictable or totalizing (Shore & Wright 2015).

This paper draws on ethnographic insights into an alternative food production and trade network (AFN) in Germany to show how accountability practices can be re-appropriated for resisting one of the most powerful and harmful imperatives that order contemporary economic activities: growth. Paradoxically, decoupling from this pathway and breaking the rules of the market economy was realized by means of voluntary standards, formalized self-obligations, extensive indicator-guided monitoring and reporting schemes. The AFN mobilized these practices and tools for consistently shielding itself from utilitarian values and economies of scale. Throughout work routines, market norms and relations were meticulously excluded, whereas ostensible ecological and social externalities were made present and explicitly included in practices of evaluating, rating and pricing. At the same time, rendering the production and trade activities of the network ‘auditable’ (Power 1996) allowed it to sustain its market agency through certificates and product labels. Hence, both its members decided opposition to the workings of the market economy and their market success remained uncompromised.

I use this indicative case and the ambiguities it reveals to raise broader questions with regard to the potential of accountability practices to subvert the hegemonic norms and structures that have engendered them in the first place.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how English state initiatives to tackle ‘homelessness’ have generated a fragmentary landscape of homeless organisations that are engaged in everyday relations of mistrust and suspicion. It explores how organisational actors hold each other morally and personally to account.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past decade, the English state has facilitated the re-proliferation of ‘homelessness’ organisations through fragmentary and piecemeal funding initiatives, resulting in a markedly compartmentalised institutional landscape. These organisations are well characterised by fragility: they depend heavily on state funding and other scarce non-state resources – these are all unpredictably changeable and competitive in nature. Rather than engaging in the collaborative partnerships that are encouraged by New Public Management, I illustrate how disparate yet co-dependent organisations in a locality I call Castlebury were engaged in everyday relations of mutual mistrust and suspicion. This was facilitated by, and reinforced, interorganisational opacity and secrecy, corresponding with forms of loyalty felt to one’s organisation and to the new class of patrons who head these organisations. I explore how staff and volunteers in Castlebury’s homeless sector crossed these opaque compartmental boundaries to hold each other to account, often through gossip and other concealed methods. In the context of an ambivalent state that sponsors these organisations yet does not hold them uniformly to account, a new politics of accountability emerges: agents of the public good in Castlebury appraise the moral value of each other’s projects whilst seeking to uphold the ostensible legitimacy of one’s singular, public persona. This politics of accountability often entails the evaluation of individual agents’ personal character and is animated by personal histories of tension and alliance among individuals. This analysis illustrates the heterogeneity and contestation among humanitarian organisations and the potential intractability of opacity in contemporary projects of the public good.

Paper short abstract:

By observing the proliferation of green standards and certifications in the green bonds market, we speculate these emerge through “parrhesiac acts” that produce distinct and situated “regimes of truth.” We question whether these are really displacing old hierarchies of valuation.

Paper long abstract:

By observing the proliferation of green standards, metrics and auditing practices that defines the green bonds market, we trace the evolution of the “techno-scientific apparatus” which seeks to produce a regime of truth. We draw on the ambiguity of the historically contingent concept of parrhesia (Foucault 1999): meaning sometimes “idle talk;” sometimes “true discourse” of those who hold certain moral and political characteristics–and thus are held accountable. We speculate that in the green bonds market, processes of certification emerge as “parrhesiac” acts. 

Through case studies of two different green bonds, we show that as “acts of enunciation” (Latour 2010), the certification of these bonds perform as “charismatic signifiers”  (Wengrow 2008), whose “regime of truth”  is bound to different moral, political and legal landscapes. Mobilizing the literature on legal materiality (Kang 2020) and anthropology of law, we thus contend that certification is only loosely bound to the metrics of the bonds’ green projects. If anything, rather than engaging in the verification of information, certification covers the metrics up, rendering it less visible and opaque. 

We question whether these new practices really displace old hierarchies of valuation, firmly grounded on financial ratings and other “fundamentals”.  As “parrhesiac act”, the act of green certification seeks to provide a super partes truth which abstracts both the essence of natural capitalised assets, both the forms of numeric measures. Yet, by supplying a ground of trust to investors, it provides the veridiction tool “the market” seems unable to deliver.

Paper short abstract:

This article shows how accountability and audit regimes are objects which can be manipulated by skilful professionals with considerable artistry - reworking the metrics to fit their own subjectivities and thereby making sense of their roles in the organisation.

Paper long abstract:

Audit cultures are often portrayed as regimes which generate truths, fix responsibilities and constrain or produce certain forms of subjectivity. Yet they can also be subject to experimentation, optimization and contestation (Winthereik & Jensen, 2017). This article draws on an ethnographic study of an international development organisation to show how accountability and audit regimes are objects which can be manipulated by skilful professionals. If audit regimes do institutional work by expressing and pressing for values within an organisational hierarchy, then the richness of these regimes – the variety of metrics and indices and indicators within the organisational landscape – permits opportunities for creativity and lassitude. Drawing on two cases within the ethnographic study, the article shows the considerable artistry through which officials navigate this landscape and express their professional values, reworking the metrics to fit their own subjectivities and thereby making sense of their roles in the organisation. The article suggests that metrics and targets are clay to be manipulated as much as cages to imprison. It considers how institutional actors use metrics as part of their organisational sense-making and self-expression.