NPM's 'Ideals' About the Accountability and Control of Outsourced Activities : Tough, But Realizable, or a Utopian Dream?

This paper analyses the accountability and control process of activities outsourced by municipali-ties in the Netherlands. The focus is twofold: 1) on the accountability and control process be-tween the external party and the municipality (i.e., its civil servants, on behalf of the Executive) and 2) on the role that councillors, who are elected politicians, play in this context. Based on field research during which 25 cases of outsourcing in 14 Dutch municipalities were studied (all with different types of activities and different levels of output measurability), a sketch is given of a typical accountability and control relationship in the Dutch local government sector. The research shows the importance of the provision of detailed financial information by the external organisa-tion as well as immediate contact between this party and the municipality in the case of ‘prob-lems'. Furthermore, the accountability and control relationship between these two parties seems to be rather loose while frequent informal contacts play a major role. In addition, the research made clear that trust is a crucial element in the relationship. This finding is not in alignment with the assumption of a principal-agent-based type of relationship (as advocated by New Public Management) with strict forms of contracting, monitoring and control, and an important role for ac-counting information on outputs (or even outcomes) and their quality. In fact, apart from their emphasis on financial information, civil servants and councillors seemed to make very little use of accounting reports and further accountability and transparency information, even in those cases where rather detailed data on activities and outputs was available