Downward accountability for a natural disaster recovery effort: Evidence and issues from Australia's Black Saturday

This study provides evidence on the nature and extent of downward accountability rendered by key government agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to victims during the extended period of recovery from Australia's 2009 ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires disaster. It also provides a critical assessment of the interplay between downward, upward (or hierarchical) and internal (or identity) accountability. It questions whether the concept of ‘downward accountability’ loses meaning when applied to the published special-purpose disaster recovery reports of the organizations leading the recovery effort. Document analysis is undertaken on the traits of downward accountability displayed in the text and images published in the disaster recovery reports of the controlling government authority, a government/NGO partnership coordinating the appeals fund and three separate participating Christian-denominated NGOs. These report traits include readability by, closeness to and empowerment of beneficiaries. Subsequent interviews with senior financial and communications executives of these organizations shed light on the motivation for the preparation of the recovery reports. The findings have implications concerning the problematization of downward accountability. The appearance of downward accountability traits in these reports appears to be an artifact of the motivation for upward and internal accountability. Moreover, downward accountability through the mode of charitable deeds-based recovery actions seems to be devoid of principal–agent expectations. For these reasons, in the context of a natural disaster, downward accountability does not sit well, conceptually, in a stakeholder-oriented accountability typology framework.