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The New Accountability: Environmental Responsibility across Borders

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In contemporary debates about democratic governance, the concept of accountability is hard to avoid. At least from a European perspective, recent innovations in political and administrative decision-making have multiplied opportunities for citizens to hold to account those who exercise governmental authority. Or so we are told. Whether busy modernizing constitutional structures or realigning public services along market-led lines, our political representatives have proclaimed a new era of open and responsive government. Accountability, in these terms, denotes enhanced processes of public oversight and answerability for decision-making involving political authority. In practice it has seen the emergence of an audit culture in which administrative efficiency and service delivery targets are paramount – where citizens become clients and public officials become managers. Nevertheless, it has not been easy to shake off the core political dimension of accountability – that decisions made in our name can be discussed and challenged.

This book is preoccupied with overcoming the tendency to think about accountability as only taking place within state borders and only featuring governmental actors. Looking above all at transboundary flows of pollution, its central claim is that processes of public answerability for harm rest most justly on treating all victims (real or potential) with equal respect. That means that both state and non-state producers of significant harm have a moral obligation effectively to consider the interests of all affected parties, whether these parties are fellow co-nationals or foreigners. In the study I employ a non-territorial notion of the ‘public’ to break away from the idea that we need only worry about the harm we cause to those immediately around us (both in space and time). Environmental responsibility – that is, accountability claims entailing claims to redress as well as answerability – should be established in open public discussions about harm and risk, where affected publics become collectively aware of harm received as being attributable to particular decisions or policies. The question of redress, of effective regulatory controls, is crucial to realizing what I label this new (non-territorial) accountability. And in the book I try and show how new accountability norms are informing the campaigning of transnational activist networks and also starting to feature in international environmental regimes. These accountability norms feed into, and are bolstered by, transnational spaces of public communication. In mapping out shared pathways of social and ecological harm, transnational publics cannot avoid thinking about alternative futures.

About the Author
Michael Mason Mason is Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and author of Environmental Democracy (1999)
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