Abstract:
This study is about accountability of public institutions. Accountability is an important aspect
of good governance as without it there can be no democratic governance. The purpose of
this study is to review the literature available about accountability and identify the gap in
previous studies. This study, before focusing on accountability, first searched for the available
literature on this topic. Once this was done, theoretical and empirical literature were reviewed.
Published books, previous research papers, and the Internet were the secondary sources used
to obtain the qualitative data for this study. These secondary sources were analyzed using the
descriptive method. Through this study, much knowledge was gained of the actors and
processes of accountability, history of accountability, accountability framework, importance
of accountability, and types of accountability, by reviewing the theoretical literature. Further,
the accountability practices of different countries were scrutinized by going through the
empirical literature. An important research gap this study noted was that socio-demographic
and administrative factors were not fully identified in previous studies. This gap must be
narrowed or eliminated if further progress is to be made in future studies.
