Accountability is said to be about the management of expectations. Empirical studies reveal considerable variation in organizational interest, intensity, and investment in accountability relationships. Less is known, however, about what explains these observed variations. Drawing on accountability and reputation‐concerned literatures, this article argues that a reputation‐based perspective on accountability offers an underlying logic that explains how account‐giving actors and account‐holding forums actually manage these expectations and how organizations make sense of and prioritize among accountability responsibilities. Reputational considerations act as a filtering mechanism of external demands and help account for variations in degrees of interest in, and intensity of, accountability. The resulting accountability outcomes are coproduced by the reputational investment of both account‐giver and account‐holder, resulting in distinct accountability constellations and outcomes.

This article proposes a reputation‐based approach to account for two core puzzles of accountability. The first is the misfit between behavioral predictions of the hegemonic political science framework for talking about accountability, namely, principal–agent, and empirical findings. The second puzzle is the unrivaled popularity of accountability, given evidence that supposedly accountability‐enhancing measures often lead to opposite effects. A “reputation‐informed” theoretical approach to public accountability suggests that accountability is not about reducing informational asymmetries, containing “drift,” or ensuring that agents stay committed to the terms of their mandate. Accountability—in terms of both holding and giving—is about managing and cultivating one's reputation vis‐à‐vis different audiences. It is about being seen as a reputable actor in the eyes of one's audience(s), conveying the impression of competently performing one's (accountability) roles, thereby generating reputational benefits.

Crises and disasters feature high on political and public agendas around the world. Practitioners wrestle with the challenge to provide protection while maintaining legitimacy. They pine for insights that lie at the heart of public administration: designing effective institutions and preserving transparency; enabling and empowering citizens without undermining a coordinated response; balancing long-term risks against short-term needs; bridging the divide between theory and practice, and between the public and private sectors. But in the debates about designing institutions that protect against transboundary threats and critical infrastructure failures, the public administration community is strangely absent. It has parked itself on the sideline, concerning itself with the routine processes of governance. In this article, we argue that the time has come for public administration scholars to incorporate crisis and disaster management into the main research agendas of the field.

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The concepts of ‘lesson drawing’ and ‘policy transfer’ have become increasingly influential ways of understanding public policy, especially in the UK. However, the main proponents of the concepts, Rose for ‘lesson drawing’ and Dolowitz and Marsh for ‘policy transfer’, have difficulty in providing convincing answers to three questions that are important for them and those engaged in similar studies. First, can they be defined as distinctive forms of policy-making separate from other, more conventional, forms? ‘Lesson drawing’ is very similar to conventional accounts of ‘rational’ policy-making and ‘policy transfer’ is very difficult to define distinctly from many other forms of policy-making. Second, why does ‘lesson drawing’ and ‘policy transfer’ occur rather than some other form of policy-making? The proponents of ‘policy transfer’ put a set of diverse and conflicting theories under a common framework, obscuring differences between them. Third, what are the effects of ‘lesson drawing’ and ‘policy transfer’ on policy-making and how do they compare to other processes? Whilst the effect of more ‘lesson drawing’ seems to be more ‘rational’ policy-making, the effect of ‘policy transfer’ on policy ‘success’ and ‘failure’ is less clear. Dolowitz and Marsh redescribe aspects of ‘failure’ as different forms of ‘transfer’ rather than giving independent reasons for outcomes based on features of transfer processes. Overall, particularly in the case of ‘policy transfer’, researchers may be better off selecting from a range of alternative approaches than limiting themselves to these conceptual frameworks.