The creation of "autonomous operative" organizations – either by privatization or devolution – is a dominant trend of recent public governance reforms. While privatization and devolution affect traditional accountability arrangements based on democratic procedures quite considerably, this is not because the intensity of regulatory mechanisms is decreasing. New market-based accountability mechanisms such as competition, price, and performance are often layered upon existing regulatory regimes, such as organizational boards with elected representatives of the public.
The paper contributes to the understanding of the relationship between conflicting principles of procedural and performance accountability by exploring the accountability regimes of autonomous operative organizations: What activities and strategies are applied by differing actors to manage the interface between the organization and their political and social stakeholders? To what extent can differing accountability mechanisms ensure that common good goals are achieved? These questions are addressed by conducting a comparative case study analysis of such salient policy fields as water supply and public housing in two federal states of Germany.