Accountability, or the way people explain and justify specific social situations, ‘is part of the general fabric of human interchange’ (Strathern 2000a: 4). It is a concept of central importance to the understanding of social action (Garfinkel 1967: 1). Futhermore, public accountability is evidently required for good governance, redistributive justice and fair resource allocation as it can minimise unpredictability and arbitrariness and can control discretion (Dowdle 2006; Mashaw 2006). How quantitative forms of accountability shape the way people work and experience their accountability in different organisational fields is therefore an important social question worthy of (more) sustained investigation. This is especially the case when one considers that the pressure for quantitative evaluation and demands for quantitative accountability have been on the rise over the past two decades.

Prosecutors are powerful actors in the South African criminal justice system as in many other jurisdictions worldwide (UN 1990; Schönteich 2001; 2002; Jehle, Wade and Elsner 2008; Luna and Wade 2012; Tonry 2012a, 2012b). In South Africa the National Prosecuting Authority Act 32 of 1998 and Section 179 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996 equip them with extensive powers of discretion to initiate or discontinue criminal proceedings on behalf of the state, backed by the power of the state.

They decide who to charge with a criminal offence, what charges to file and when to dismiss or withdraw a case.

When the old apartheid prosecuting authority was transformed and the first new National Prosecuting Authority was established in 1998, one of the main objectives of the new NPA leadership was to legitimise the power of prosecutors in the eyes of those they had until recently suppressed. They envisioned prosecutors, as I mentioned before, as ‘lawyers for the people’ (Barrell and Soggott 1998; Schönteich 2001: 1). To be accountable became an important and desirable good in that transformation process.

Are the NPA and the prosecutorial profession accountable today? Are they more accountable than before 1994? While I showed in Chapter 1 that the accountability mechanism governing the NPA and its employees has been clearly diversified and intensified since 1998, I also argued at various stages of this book that whether accountability has been rendered depends to a large extent on the involved actors’ understandings of the concept.

This is a book about accountability. More specifically, it is about quantitative accountability and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) in South Africa. I am interested in how prosecutors, who have the power to call others to account for wrongdoing, are themselves held accountable Central to this study is the role played by recently introduced performance measurement systems in the way prosecutors are held accountable. I explore how these measurement systems shape and influence South African prosecutors’ understanding of accountability and their prosecutorial practices.I ask whether there are significant implications for legal work, as the language of ‘performance statistics’ ‘indicators’ ‘targets’, ‘rates’ and ‘rankings’ is becoming common parlance within the judicial system.

While numerical representations are gaining increasing importance for the demonstration of accountability in many government and non-government settings in the twenty-first century, the effects and consequences of this for our social, institutional and political life are relatively opaque.

The ethnographic study of multi-local organisations provides the researcher with a challenge, ‘given ethnography’s focus on local places, on small scale, more or less observable social units and the cultural meanings and practices that constitute them’ as Merry states(2006: 980; see also Czarniawska 2008: 5). The ethnographer’s units of observation – her field sites – are harder, for example, to locate within a national state organisation like the NPA whose over three thousand employees work simultaneously in nine different provinces in national and regional head offices and in hundreds of district, regional and high courts, scattered around South Africa.

Performance statistics, indicators, rates and targets were a common feature in the working world of most prosecutors who I observed and interviewed. During the hundreds of hours of ethnographic fieldwork conducted within the NPA between 2008 and 2012, they often discussed their work and their daily concerns in terms of NPA statistics or with regard to specific NPA performance rates and indicators, both with each other and with me. For example, lower court prosecutors would refer to cases which could be finalised quickly – namely cases where the offender pleaded guilty at first or second appearance or where the case would be mediated or diverted away from the criminal justice system – as ‘good for the stats’ or as ‘assisting them in achieving their target’ during these informal tea or lunch break conversations.

Accountability always involves at least two parties (‘A’ and ‘B’): A, who has been entrusted with authority, discretion and/or money and who has therefore the duty to take responsibility and explain and justify certain actions and decisions to B; and B, who has some form of authority to compel A to act in a particular way and who has the right to ask questions and to demand an account from A about what she did or did not do (Sinclair 1995; Mashaw 2006; Messner 2009). A crucial moment in this relationship is, according to various accountability scholars, that those to whom accountability is to be rendered, have to be convinced – after they received the accounts – that accountability has indeed been rendered. They state that while expectations of how accountability should be demonstrated are never static (Dowdle 2006), they often have a ‘cultural stamp’ (Strathern 2000a: 2).

Social scientific studies, which focus on the effects of performance indicators and rankings on specific organisational fields, often include accounts of individual professionals whose reaction and attitude towards performance measurement can be summarised as critical, cynical and sometimes even fearful.Sally Engle Merry(2011: S87), who investigates the rapid increase internationally of the use of indicators to monitor like for human rights compliance, describes human rights activists who ‘(u)ntil the 1990s [ … ] resisted the use of indicators because of concern about lack of data, oversimplifications, and bias. [ … ] Indicators measure aggregates, while human rights are held by individuals’. The criticism from activists was that the specificity of the human right, its individual violation and the country’s specific context might be overlooked or misrepresented when international organisations begin to use indicators to calculate something like a human rights compliance rate.

Introduction

Accountability is a watchword firmly established in contemporary politics, policies and organizational life in many countries world-wide (UN 2007; Espeland and Vannebo 2007; Power 2008: XV). Presently there are calls for greater and more expansive forms of accountability; rarely do we hear of calls for less. In the simplest sense, accountability describes situations in which people, who have been entrusted with power and money, are required to explain and justify their decisions – in other words, when their resource allocation and their professional and ethical reasoning are scrutinized. It is, however, only rarely that accountability scholars highlight the concept's obscurity, vagueness and its ‘chameleon’-like character (except Sinclair 1995: 219; Boström and Garsten 2008: 5; Koppell 2005; Strathern 2000a). When, where, to whom and on what basis someone is made to be accountable can look very different, depending on the involved actors’ understandings of the concept.

It is often pointed out that expectations of how accountability should be produced are never static (Dowdle 2006). Heated debates around the ‘correct’ way to ensure that public officials work in the best interests of the public and remain trustworthy are nothing new (von Dornum 1997). Over the last ten to fifteen years, however, various scholars have noted that the rapid increase of quantitative forms of accountability in many governmental settings world-wide are radically shifting these debates (Power 1997; Shore and Wright 1999; Strathern 2000a; 2000b). When being accountable becomes more and more synonymous with using quantitative measures and creating supposedly ‘verifiable’ accounts, then, scholars argue, our understanding of how accountability can be defined and rendered becomes narrower. People will be less accepting and convinced by other forms and it becomes difficult for institutions to otherwise practice accountability, that is, without performance indicators, rankings, benchmarking and/or audits and more deliberative forms of account-giving (Espeland and Vannebo 2007: 40; Rottenburg 2000).

Although quantitative forms of accountability are in high demand because they appear to have the capacity to simplify complex social phenomena and make these more accessible to outsiders and lay people, critics point out that the increased transparency achieved through this ‘information reductionism’ is illusory and counterproductive (Tsoukas 1997: 829).