ABSTRACT
Community legitimacy derives only from the extent to which community organisations sustain the functions of articulating and pursuing community goals. Accountability to the partnership machinery becomes confused with accountability to the ‘original’ local government, private sector or community interest represented in the partnership structures. Sustainable development is often led from planning or environmental health departments, with a new emergent ‘profession’ of environmental coordinators beginning to draw together Agenda 21 activity. The accountability of local decision-makers to democratic control through election, however, represents only one route through which accountability can be demanded or proffered. Political accountability remains, however, the main focus for debate with the key issue being the relative merits of representative versus participative democracy. Directors or partnership board members from the community sector carry individual as well as collective responsibility and there is an acknowledged tension between accountability within a specific partnership and accountability to the community organisation from which a partner comes.
