Kanishka Jayasuriya

The recent decision to invest in a substantial multimillion dollar award to the China Studies Centre at the Australian National University (ANU) as well as the broader public discussion over the significance of Asian language teaching highlight critical issues about the nature and direction of public investment in research on Australia’s region. The most important issue is the lack of a coherent strategy to guide work on the profound social and political transformation that is occurring in the region and Australia’s role in the new Asian Century. This debate is to be welcomed but it has to be based on a clearly articulated rationale for public investment in research.

'Who' is accountable to 'whom' becomes a crucial issue in new modes of governance. The thrust of a substantial literature on regulatory governance at the global or national level is towards a search for substitute mechanisms of accountability and monitoring, operating outside formal governmental institutions. And here, what I term 'accountability communities' perform a crucial function. Accountability communities are complex and composed of public and/or private organisations and they: a) perform legislative, monitoring and compliance activities in specific functionally based regulatory regimes within and beyond, national boundaries; b) operate through institutional forms such as deliberative forums, markets, or use of network mechanisms; and c) possess particular understandings of accountability that binds various actors together.