Transformative Accountability: Rethinking Power, Practice and Possibility

Éditeurs invités

• Rebecca Warren, Northumbria University
• Anne Steinhoff, University of Essex
• Jeremy Morales, University of Bristol
• Susan O'Leary, University of London
• Ileana Steccolini, University of Essex

Synthèse

This special issue examines accountability as a mechanism for enabling social change and democratic participation across multiple levels of organization. Rather than reinforcing conventional accountability frameworks, the editors seek to reimagine how accountability practices can support collective, citizen-led initiatives and challenge existing power structures through dialogic, decolonial, feminist, and environmental approaches.

The call welcomes diverse submission formats beyond traditional research articles, including methodological reflections on participatory research, practice notes developed with activists and practitioners, and experimental visual presentations. Contributions should engage with transformative accountability as a situated, relational process that attends to lived experiences and examines transformation from local community practices to large-scale systemic change.

Thèmes proposés

• Conceptualising transformative accountability: beyond compliance with traditional practices and the critique of alternatives - what makes accountability transformative?
• Accountability beyond a principal-agent focus: mutual, collective and relational forms, where stakeholders have assumed accountability and created shared stewardship
• Engaging in citizens-led accountability, including, for example community organising and social movements such as campaigns, coalitions and assemblies as sites of transformative accountability
• Prefiguration and the struggle for transformation: How do alternative accountability practices engage in prefigurative practices and politics?
• Relational accountability as transformative: How do dialogic and participatory practices foster transformative accountability?
• Methodologies for engaged, messy research: including approaches to an ethics of care, positionality, co-production in research and navigating risk and harm in such research
• Explorations of how disclosures are interpreted, mobilised or re-appropriated by communities and movements
• Different levels and scales of transformation, from the individual to the systematic or structural and the mechanisms that enable transformative accountability at different levels
• Decolonial, feminist and environmental perspectives that challenge coloniality and neoliberal logics in accountability
• Pedagogies of transformative accountability and transformative learning
• Consequences and limits: when transformative accountability backfires or become performative
• Academic engagement: How can researchers move beyond critique to co-creation of transformative accountability practices? Explorations of the ways that we as academics can engage in impactful and transformative forms of accountability