The Politics of Public Accountability

This book seeks to consistently explain the role of ideas and institutions in policy outcomes, and addresses the problem of how resource nationalism causes a deficit of public accountability in oil producing countries from Latin America and the Caribbean. The authors present a causal mechanism linking ideas and policy outcomes through institutional arrangements, focusing on policy design to describe the role of instruments selection and combination in improving or reducing public accountability through agenda setting, policy formulation, cross-sectorial coordination and political interplays.

Makes a new contribution to the literature on the policy design frame-work Develops a small-n comparison of the causal mechanism linking resource nationalism and public accountability deficits Focusses on four major Latin American oil producing countries: Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico and Brazil

Autorentext
Guillaume Fontaine is a senior researcher at FLACSO, Ecuador. He specializes in comparative policy analysis. He coordinates the Public Accountability Project, a collective research about public accountability deficits in various Latin American countries. He has published extensively on social environmental conflicts and democratic governance in Latin America.
Cecilia Medrano Caviedes is an analytical economist with a multidisciplinary background. Her research interests include the political economy of natural resources and the governance of extractive industries. She has been a consultant for the Natural Resource Governance Institute, Ciudadanos por la Transparencia, the Venezuelan Ministry of Finance, and UNESCO.
Iván Narváez is Professor and Researcher at FLACSO, Ecuador. He graduated from the University Simon Bolivar, Ecuador, where he specialized in collective indigenous rights and comparative constitutional law. He has been Director of the Environmental Protection Office at Petroecuador and has published extensively about social and environmental issues related to oil activities in the Amazon region.

Inhalt
Chapter 1 Public Accountability Deficits as a Policy Problem.- Chapter 2 The Policy Design Framework.- Chapter 3 A Realist Approach to Policy Design.- Chapter 4 Open and Closed Resource Nationalism.- Chapter 5 How Resource Nationalism Hinders Public Accountability.- Chapter 6 From Policy to Institutional Design