Challenges to overall well-being— environmental degradation, poverty, mobility, chronic health issues—remain persistent because they comprise interconnected problems that cross boundaries between private, non-profit and governmental sectors. Such wicked problems or grand challenges have to be tackled through the collaborative efforts of organizations. By participating in these collaborative arrangements, organizations still accomplish their core missions despite increasing interdependencies and achieving a collective output. However, by operating through interorganizational arrangements they also lose part of their sovereignty and collaborating with other organizations can create dependencies and risks that can be hard to manage.
Classical hierarchical accountability arrangements are thus challenged in this context, and the question is what other accountability arrangements are possible, to support the effectiveness of collaborative organizational forms. On the one hand, existing accountability systems often only hold the single organization accountable for their individual performance and as such might even function counterproductive in achieving the common good. On the other hand, the question arises, how can we avoid accountability getting lost in the diffusion or even the evaporation of different responsibilities? In the literature on (the governance of) collaborations and networks, questions of accountability are not often discussed and even somehow seen almost as an oxymoron.
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