Public accountability challenges and pandemic. What’s beyond numbers?

Epidemics stand out as an extraordinary threat to public order that tests the capacity of national and local governments for the coordinated management of populations and their resources. To face the cruelest phases of the COVID-19 emergency, governments deployed different institutional arrangements providing them with special powers and responsibilities, while new procedures have been established together with new channels of accountability. This chapter aims to understand if and how public accountability has changed during the COVID-19 emergency. Did new features of accountability emerge during the pandemic? Were those features different from the accountability features of other extraordinary situations? The chapter focuses on this analysis through many levels: of whom, to what, for what, measurement and assessment basis, and the represented role of accounting and calculative practices (Bracci et al., 2015). Drawing from a literature review of contributions on public accountability since the 2020s, findings point out the role, the new features, and the accountability challenges, shifting from objective communication to informing and persuading stakeholders and legitimizing policymakers’ decisions.