accountability – Alyssa Bittner-Gibbs

Everyone Can Wait

I have spent the week complying with deadlines, that quaint arrangement in which a date arrives and something is expected to be finished. Public writing had to take a back seat. Having finally resurfaced, I turned to the Sustainability Council’s anniversary minutes and discovered an altogether more accommodating relationship with unfinished business. In the party games of public participation, everybody can be involved without necessarily being allowed to interfere with anything. After ten years, the interesting question is what membership enables people to change, beyond their afternoon plans.

Everyone Can Agree

Ten years of planning the future. Three weeks—and counting—to put one afternoon on the record. Following Minna Hellström’s criticism on Ålands Radio, a little protokoll bingo opens onto a larger question about power, institutional comfort and what happens to criticism after everyone has been thanked for contributing. The paperwork has done its ten thousand steps. Power has not left its chair. What, precisely, is being sustained?

Same As It Ever Was

I went looking for the history of ÅHS and found a repertory company. Think Ålandic Blackadder, with more organisational charts and a remarkably durable cast. Doctors become politicians. Journalists become board members. Each decade brings a change of wardrobe and a cunning plan to resolve the difficulties created by the previous cunning plan. Hippocrates and Montesquieu are summoned to an argument neither lived long enough to regret attending. The lawyers get repeat business. The rest of us get another premiere. Somewhere beneath it all lies a question we have been reorganising for thirty years: how do you get an institution full of people who know better to work better together?

Everyone Can Speak

Micke Larsson welcomes discussion. Fredrika Fellman would like an answer. His latest interview and his summer talk raise a question about ambition, power and social sustainability: what changes when a leader’s account of himself meets somebody else’s experience? It is possible to leave Wimbledon without leaving the VIP section. Everyone can speak. But power must answer for what it does.

The buck stops here.

Åland’s government has offered its explanation. Its own emails leave rather more to explain. Here are the demands, the evidence supplied in response, and the question still waiting on the Lantråds desk: who takes responsibility?

accountabilityA collection of 5 posts