ABSTRACT
Seaport accountability may appear straightforward enough at first glance: If seaports are public agencies created by government, they should be required to render an accounting for their actions and their performance according to well-established standards regularly applied to government departments. In order to move beyond the stalemate between Port critics and defenders, a better understanding of Port organizations is required and the accountability concept requires clarification. This chapter examines the essential characteristics of seaports and how they are uniformly organized as public enterprise in the United States, the variety of their jurisdictional locations and institutional relations with other governments, and then takes up the accountability concept. Traditional usages of accountability are reviewed in order to offer a reconceptualization tailored to the basic characteristics of Ports organized as public enterprise, which, in turn, is applied to the US Port industry.
