This post is written by Zulfiqar Younus, former director of the Civil Services Academy, Lahore.

  • **The problem: **The civil service of Pakistan is inward focused. They are self-centered instead of citizen-centered.
  • Why it matters: This approach has added endless layers of bureaucratic procedures to the government functions - making them complex and less efficient by the day.
  • The solution: The civil servants' answerability and accountability compass needs to be adjusted and made citizen-centric again.

Accountability lies at the heart of democratic government and when it works, it benefits everyone. In the political context, accountability took on a less rigid meaning from its literal definition and instead started to be associated with a promise of justice and propriety. Accountability does not refer to the king as judge but rather that the king is accountable to his people. Leaders need to be accountable to the ones they lead.

In today’s democratic system, this means that the civil servants of a country are accountable to the people they’ve promised to serve. In Pakistan, accountability has been understood more traditionally and is limited to checks and balances from an outside entity such as the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), the premier government body to investigate and curb corruption. However, accountability encompasses much more and needs to be redefined both at the individual and organisational levels.

The Fredrick-Finer debate of the 1940s best described the conflicting notions as to how best civil servants can be held accountable. Herman Finer considered that accountability could only be ensured by maintaining rigorous external controls, while Carl Friedrich asserted that self-restraint, based on an array of internal norms and values, is more feasible. As a matter of fact, the mechanisms and regulations for external accountability are somewhat in place, though not that impactful. Intrinsic accountability is found more crucial to sustainable good governance because this innate sense of accountability produces more accountable leaders.

What makes accountable leaders

An accountable leader is someone who inspires a culture where everybody steps up, takes ownership, and delivers results. Accountability is also not just about being "honest”, as is commonly perceived, but rather it's about creating and maintaining a system that operates smoothly.

If accountability just followed the ‘catch the thief’ model, systematically speaking, every time a thief is caught another will follow. Simply getting rid of the thief will not fix the problem, rather the conversation needs to be shifted from "who did it" to "why did they do it", and that will help identify the root cause of the problem within the system. With accountability comes the opportunity to improve systems gradually. For today’s civil servants, it is essential to understand the true meaning of accountability and realise its importance in the public sector.

For this purpose, the Civil Services Academy (CSA) in Lahore has been offering accountable leadership workshops in partnership with the Accountability Lab Pakistan. These workshops help trainee civil servants develop self and social accountability by helping redefine and break down accountability into value systems and highlight the importance of embracing these values to become accountable leaders. The values of accountability, as redefined by the Accountability Lab, are integrity, humility, practicality, collaboration, and innovation. In other words, if we observe the actions of a great leader throughout history, they would have above five values in common.

Honesty, integrity and consistency

Great leaders are always consistent, they create change, they work with partners, listen to their stakeholders, make promises that they can keep, and most importantly, they create systems that don’t break down when they leave. The need of the hour is for civil servants to inculcate these values and realise that accountability is not merely directed upwards toward higher-ups but downwards to the people they serve. As accountable leaders, civil servants must involve citizen feedback in their decision-making process and involve multiple stakeholders to solve problems efficiently.

One of the most prominent examples of motivating accountable leaders in Pakistan is that of the ‘Integrity Icon’ award. This is an annual campaign led by Accountability Lab Pakistan

(ALP) that has been running over the past five years and awards the five most accountable government employees each year, from over 100 entries from across the country. The icons are awarded based on their commitment to public service, transparency, self-accountability, and good governance. This campaign is a platform that pushes the conversation of accountable leadership forward and encourages public officials by ‘naming and faming’ them. Similar campaigns at the CSA could encourage self-accountability and the importance of it for a soon-to-be public officer in Pakistan.

Other avenues of strengthening and promoting self-accountability for public servants lie in social networking platforms such as Apolitical, where they can connect with public officials from all over the world and gain valuable insights on leadership from the world’s best leaders. Innovation is also a key element in today’s growing bureaucracies, and as such, innovation labs are a great space to collaborate to innovate the public policy process and make it more citizen-centric. The civil servants of today must be equipped with all these tools to lead with accountability, and by extension, to lead the country towards developing better systems of governance.

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