Consulting No One: Is Democratic Administration the Answer for First Nations?

• Main Authors: Ph. D. Candidate, Mai Nguyen
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Behn; Canada; Indian; First Nations
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.431.7522; http://www.innovation.cc/scholarly-style/19_1_7_nguyen_democractic-administration.pdf

In 1996, the Office of the Auditor General (OAG) of Canada released its report, Study of Accountability Practices from the Perspective of First Nations, which found that governments and First Nations have different understandings of what is meant by accountability. While the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) understood the department’s mechanism of accountability to be concerned with the form of accountability for funding, First Nations believed accountability required increasingly open and transparent dialogue between the department and the people it affects; that is, accountability for performance which means that government action must achieve high results to cover citizens ’ expectations (Behn, 2001: 10). However, accountability for performance is not occurring in practice. Instead, the implementation of the New Public Management model in Canada since the 1980s has not fulfilled its mandate to be more effective and accountable because of the model’s focus on treating citizens like consumers. This paper argues that accountability for performance can