Accountability: New challenges,new forms

Abstract

The general call for more accountability, affecting all western institutions, has reached the communication professionals as well. How can they cope with this new challenge? The danger is that they focus mainly on outcomes, so on performative accountability, whereas decisional accountability, meaning that they are able to explain why they made particular decisions in the process of communication should be a prerequisite, also for quality in performative accountability. Both types of accountability have to go together. The relation with planning approaches is discussed and the ways decisional accountability can be achieved: by ongoing education, internal deliberation or (and this is stressed) external deliberation and examination by external experts.