Purpose: The financial resilience of local authorities has been a serious concern over the past decade due to austerity and its effects on local government budgets despite rising service demands. More recently, the scale and suddenness of the shock from COVID-19 has exacerbated problems of...

Purpose: This paper aims to trace the hybridising of financial and service expertise in English local authority budget control to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the contexts that gave rise to hybridisation than do previous accountability research frameworks....

Purpose: This paper considers the accounting and accountability practices of the UK government’s response to COVID-19 for England, focussing on the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. Design/methodology/approach: Based on a close reading of the news media and official reports from government...

This paper explores how a lower government organisation can act as an institutional entrepreneur. It builds on recent public sector budgeting research that identified the endogenisation of budget rules as an important element of institutional entrepreneurship. Inspired by a Wittgensteinian...