ENSURING ACCOUNTABLE NETWORKS IN BANGLADESH: AN INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS

Over the past few decades, the world has shifted from government to governance. As such, the simple service delivery processes have turned into a complex web connecting different organizations. This has caused the rise of a system what we know as networks. Cooperation and collaboration among the organizations in the networks have been considered the key to success. Intensifying cooperation and collaboration have in turn caused the responsibilities to shrink. It has become quite normal to assume that the responsibilities will be performed by others. Similarly, it has also become very difficult to hold organization as well as actors accountable for results that are produced in a collective manner and so maintaining accountability has been a major challenge. The paper, using the institutional perspective, has targeted to meet the challenge by identifying factors that cause accountability problems and proposes an improved framework so that the factors can be properly dealt with while ensuring accountability in and of networks. The paper presents that it is the failure of bureaucracy as an institution that has led to the accountability problems in and of networks. An in-depth review of literature has been carried out to identify accountability-related problem-posing factors in and of networks not only in general but also in case of Bangladesh and finally, drawn from Klijn and Koppenjan’s model (2014) of accountability management, an improved framework is proposed that can deal with accountability issues properly and ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of the networks.