Public Accounts Committees in the Commonwealth: oversight, effectiveness, and governance

Abstract

The World Bank, Consultant on Legislative AffairsFor the past 15 years the international community has assumed that by strengthening legislative capacity, legislatures are better equipped to oversee government activity and spending, to keep governments accountable, to secure good governance, prevent corruption, and create the conditions for sustainable economic development. The purpose of the present paper is to test this set of assumptions by focusing on one of the oversight tools that the international community regards as particularly important, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). Structural and organisational features that affect the performance of PACs is analysed, the relationship between oversight activity and effectiveness is investigated, and it is assessed whether good governance is a function of oversight activity, of effectiveness or of both. The analyses reveal that while oversight activity does not always have a significant or directly positive impact on good governance, good governance is indeed a function of oversight effectiveness as the international community had long assumed.

Public Accounts Committees in Eastern Africa: A Comparative Analysis

“…Finally, while some of previous analyses (e.g. by Pelizzo, 2011) showed that the presence of opposition MPs on the PAC is a major determinant of the number of meetings held and of the number of reports produced by the committee, other studies (e.g. by Pelizzo, 2013) did not detect such a relationship-which is why Stapenhurst, Pelizzo and Jacobs (2013) suggested that the determinants of PAC effectiveness are very much country and region-specific.…”

“…Hence, the size of the support staff is the fourth factor that we consider in our analysis. Note however that the importance of having a large and well trained staff, has been documented for the Commonwealth as a whole (Pelizzo, 2011), Asia (Stapenhurst, Pelizzo, Jacobs, 2013) and the Pacific (Pelizzo, 2013) but not elsewhere or at least not significantly so. 6 Hence, it is worth investigating whether the performance of East African…”

“…The comparative literature has repeatedly shown that Public Accounts Committees (PACs) matter (Pelizzo, 2011;Stapenhurst, Pelizzo and Jacobs, 2013). They are important instrument of oversight, they are instrumental to keeping governments accountable, they can contribute to improving the quality of policies and their implementation, they can detect and deter the 1 Riccardo Pelizzo is a consultant in legislative affairs for the World Bank Institute, and a senior visiting research fellow at REPOA.…”

Public Accounts Committees in the Pacific Region

“…Some studies assumed that it was appropriate to do so, other studies decided to inquire as to whether the levels of output (meetings, hearings) were actually related to frequency with which PACs were able to achieve policy relevant results (Pelizzo, 2011), while other studies (Bianchi, 2012) equated the success of PACs with their ability to save public money.…”

“…Specifically, McGee (2002) suggested that the size of a PAC, the partisan affiliation of the PAC Chairperson and the size of the staff at the disposal of a PAC are largely responsible for its success. Building on the work by McGee (2002), Pelizzo (2011) suggested that the partisan composition of the PAC membership, that is whether opposition forces are adequately represented in the committee, is very important.…”