BEYOND ACCOUNTABILITY: POLITICAL LEGITIMACY AND DELEGATED WATER GOVERNANCE IN AUSTRALIA
| Author | MATTHEW WOOD |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12178 |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
doi : 10. 1111/p adm .12178
BEYOND ACCOUNTABILITY: POLITICAL LEGITIMACY
AND DELEGATED WATER GOVERNANCE IN
AUSTRALIA
MATTHEW WOOD
Studies of delegated agencies commonly emphasize the importance of accountability for these
unelected bodies to secure authority to govern. This article argues that beyond formal account-
ability measures, developing legitimacy through interaction with external stakeholders is critical
to agency authority. In doing so, the article makes a distinctive contribution by applying a new
conceptual model based on organizational sociology and identifying multiple dimensions along
which legitimacy is lost and won, and hence authority secured. The article presents original ndings
from a case study of how the Murray–Darling Basin Authority, an Australian water agency estab-
lished in 2007, attempted to achieve ‘political legitimacy’. Findings show that the Agency achieved
legitimacy via appeals to common normative/ethical values and developing commonly used
information and news outlets, despite facing opposition from stakeholders on the socioeconomic
impact of its policies. The conclusion argues that the framework can usefully be applied to other
agencies in ‘wicked problem’ policy areas.
INTRODUCTION
Delegated agencies perform crucial tasks in society,like regulating food standards, manag-
ing ood defences, and assessing the safety of drugs. They are also, however,often viewed
with suspicion in the public eye as undemocratic ‘quangos’, and hence face challenges
about how to secure consent for their policies from wider society. This article presents
original evidence of how they attempt to address these challenges, focusing on the achieve-
ment of political legitimacy. Existing research tends to use the concept of ‘accountability’
to investigate agency legitimacy issues (Bovens 2007), and focuses on formal institutional
mechanisms rather than external political support. ‘Political legitimacy’, by contrast, refers
to the acceptance of an institution’s decisions as authoritative and justied by external
actors (Bernstein and Cashore 2007).
This article suggests that deploying Suchman’s (1995) framework of types of ‘political
legitimacy’ developed by Cashore (2002) (‘cognitive’, ‘moral’, and ‘pragmatic’) can enable
a detailed analysis of how agencies secure governing authority by appealing to certain val-
ues and interests in an interactive relationship with actors in governance networks and the
wider public. The key argument is that by constructing (shaping, developing, and mend-
ing) their levels of political legitimacy among stakeholders, agencies can improve public
support for their work across different dimensions. This can create a sustained and stable
dialogue that supplements what Schillemans (2011) calls agencies’ broader ‘horizontal’
or ‘public’ accountability and enhances their capacity for effectively achieving ‘credible
commitments’.
This article reports results from an intensive case study aimed at developing an ana-
lytical framework for use in an international study of delegated agencies’ legitimacy. The
agency chosen was the Murray–Darling Basin Authority (MDBA), established in 2007 in
Matthew Woodis at the, Department of Politics, University of Shefeld, UK.
The copyright line for this article was changed on 7 September after original online publication.
Public Administration Vol.93, No. 4, 2015 (1012–1030)
© 2015 The Authors. Public Administration published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionLicense, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
POLITICAL LEGITIMACY AND WATER GOVERNANCE 1013
south-east Australia. The MDBA recommends and implements water management
policies in one of the world’s most complex, yet economically and socially vital,
ecological systems: the Murray–Darling Basin. As a new agency positioned in this
‘wicked’ – complex, volatile, and politically contentious – policy area, where cooperation
from external stakeholders is crucial, the MDBA offers a useful case study of how political
legitimacy is developed and challenged.
The research was exploratory (Stebbins 2001), involving extensive original data col-
lection and analysis of how (if at all) the MDBA’s strategies could be mapped onto the
analytical framework. It proceeded rst through extensively collecting secondary data
sourced through the MDBA website (www.mdba.gov.au):186 MDBA publications, includ-
ing scientic research reports, brochures, fact sheets, and posters; 181 media releases; 25
MDBA e-newsletters; 23 Basin Community Committee Meeting Summaries; seven MDBA
Chair and Chief Executive speeches; six Annual MDBA Reports; and ve MDB Ministe-
rial Council Communiques. This built a detailed picture of external engagement strategies,
before mapping them onto the framework.
Second, the acceptance or rejection of MDBA legitimacy was determined through anal-
ysis of public usage of the MDBA’s processes (website trafc data), qualitative assess-
ment of positive/negative slanting in MDBA-related media reports and parliamentary
debates (2007–13), and a 2011 Parliamentary inquiry. A database of nearly 12,000 responses
to a 2011 stakeholder consultation and statistical data on these responses (MDBA 2011f)
were also analysed. To mitigate bias, a critical approach to data analysis was adopted,
accounting for legitimation and delegitimation (see table 2). Relationships were triangu-
lated with data collected at two MDBA events in October and December 2013 for stake-
holders, policy-makers, and academics. Hour-long semi-structured interviews were also
conducted with two senior MDBA stakeholder managers. These strongly conrmed rela-
tionships in secondary evidence, and are used here purely illustratively.
This article provides three contributions. It makes a methodological contribution by pro-
viding a systematic operationalization of political legitimacy in the case of a delegated
agency,setting a path for renement in future comparative and quantitative analysis. Ana-
lytically,it contributes novel insights into how legitimacy is developed by an agency across
multiple dimensions. The MDBA sought to gain consent to its authority in multiple over-
lapping ways, including through becoming well known among stakeholders, appealing
to socioeconomic interests, and emphasizing common normative/ethical values. Lastly, it
provides an empirical contribution by showing how an agency attempts to repair damaged
legitimacy relationships, namely through stakeholder engagement and appeals to com-
mon values (moral legitimacy) with relevance to agencies in other ‘wicked problem’ areas.
The article is divided into four sections. First, it briey reviews the literature on account-
ability as central to emergent work on the problem of agency legitimacy, before specifying
the contested concept of legitimacy as it is used in this study. It highlights how legitimacy
is a social construction, and introduces Suchman’s (1995) framework as a conceptually
systematic and empirically operationalizable approach to analysing multiple forms of
legitimacy. Second, it details the MDBA case, showing why it was chosen as salient
for examining political legitimacy. The third section presents the case study evidence,
focusing in turn on the cognitive, moral, and pragmatic dimensions. The emphasis is
on analysing the strategies pursued for achieving legitimacy, and stakeholder reactions
to those strategies. This section identies legitimation along the ‘cognitive’ dimension
of legitimacy, although the agency faced delegitimation along the ‘pragmatic’ dimen-
sion. Moral legitimacy strategies were used to mend damaged legitimacy relationships.
Public Administration Vol.93, No. 4, 2015 (1012–1030)
© 2015 The Authors. Public Administration published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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