Conference Agenda

This paper examines the nature and dynamics of accountability in public service delivery through digital governance platforms, drawing on Norway’s “life events” initiative — a strategic collaborative effort aimed at redesigning public services around citizens' life situations via integrated digital solutions. Based on multiple sources, including document analysis and semi-structured interviews with 26 central government actors and platform coordinators, we identify three accountability tensions produced and amplified by the digital platform logic: (1) centralization vs flexibility and vertical vs horizontal accountability, (2) digital technologies as enablers vs inhibitors, and (3) control vs trust. These dynamics provided us with the opportunity to theorize platform-based accountability and its distinctive features. Our findings show that while digital platforms promise seamless service integration and improved user orientation, they also create fragmented responsibilities, ambiguous control relationships, and under-institutionalized mechanisms for data-based accountability. We argue for reconceptualizing accountability in platform-based public governance as a multi-actor, data-intensive process that requires new routines, shared standards, and infrastructures for coordination and evaluation.

Regulatory agencies limit the risk-taking behavior of companies and thus ensure the safety of consumers. In carrying out their tasks effectively, agencies must cooperate with numerous different public actors, like politicians and ministries , as well as societal stakeholders (e.g. regulatees and their interest groups, consumer organizations) in the involved regulatory regime. Previous literature has demonstrated that trust between these stakeholders is crucial in ensuring the well-functioning of the regulatory regime as well as the legitimacy of the regime itself. Yet, we lack a thorough understanding about the factors that enhance and safeguard trust between various actors in regulatory regimes. Scholars have pointed towards interaction and cooperation between actors in regulatory regimes as a central driver of trust, and provide four main explanations which relate to different dimensions of trust. Scholars have pointed towards interaction and cooperation between actors in regulatory regimes as one central driver of trust, and point to different relevant mechanisms by which trust can be enhanced. First, the intensity of interactions and information exchange is said to matter. Actors which have frequent contacts with one another in which they learn through information exchange about the predictability of each others’ behavior and intention would tend to trust one another more (see interaction-based and information-based trust). Second, the mandatory or voluntary nature of interactions might matter, but in different ways. On the one hand relations which are institutionally defined and secured might foster trust among actors (institutionally-based trust). On the other hand, the use of power and control might crowd out trust in such mandatory relationship, rendering relations of a voluntary nature much more conducive for trust. Third, instead of the intensity or mandatory/voluntary nature, the ideational convergence between the interacting actors might matter most, which those actors that have similar views trusting each other the most (identification-based trust based on homophily in terms of similar views and opinions). However, given that public and private actors in regulatory regimes differ in terms of their interests, we can assume that these different trust-enhancing mechanisms might work in a different way in different ways in public-public, public-private, private-public and private-private relations.

This paper empirically studies these theoretical notions using a novel dataset consisting of survey data on the relations between 752 actors in regulatory regimes in 6 countries and 3 policy sectors. Using these data, we analyze the extent to which the various types of interactions affect the trust levels between actors in the studied regulatory regimes. The paper brings interesting insights how these different mechanisms relate to trust between public actors, like politicians, ministries and regulatory agencies, and private actors in a different way, depending on the nature of the relation and whether or not the regulatory agency is involved. In this way the paper adds to the literature on regulatory governance and public governance more in general, but also to the trust literature as such.

Addressing complex societal challenges and wicked problems, requires effective governance across different sectors and at multiple levels. Recent crises have tested the robustness and adaptability of public sector bureaucracies, while traditional concerns about control, autonomy, and accountability remain central.

This paper addresses core challenges of the governance of public sector organizations in such a context. The focus is on agencification leading to establishment of semi-autonomous central agencies with agency independence from political executives and discretion in decision making, at the same time as parent ministry is supposed to control the agency on arm length through an accountability system informed by a performance management model.

A main topic in this paper is to study how such tensions play out in practice for the Norwegian National Security Agency (NSA) by examining the process and outcome of the so-called NSA scandal in which the agency took up a loan of 200 million NOK from a private company, which was against the Norwegian Constitution, as well as several government regulations. Empirically, the main period under scrutiny is 2023-2025. The research question is how agencification plays out in practice for an agency that is on the interface between a civilian and a military security landscape linked up to both the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Defense with different administrative cultures and regulatory measures and addressing complex transboundary issues of societal security.

Theoretically, the paper will be informed by the literature of agency autonomy and control, as well as accountability theory. More specifically we will apply a transformative perspective including both an instrumental approach, a cultural approach and an environmental approach underlining hybridity and the importance of context.

Empirically, we will examine the relationship between the parent ministry/ministries and the agency as well as the relations between the government and the Parliament. Also the role of two inquiry commissions, and the Norwegian Audit Office, will be under scrutiny. The database will be public documents and reports, deliberations in the parliament, government web sites and press briefing, as well av a comprehensive media coverage of the case.

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