Summary:

In this paper we investigate how two major reforms in the Norwegian welfare sector changed accountability relationships. The reforms in question were the NAV reform of the welfare administration that Norway passed in 2005 and implemented through 2009 and the hospital reform of 2002. The NAV reform merged the national pension administration and the employment agency and established local partnerships with the municipality-based social services. The hospital reform transferred ownership from counties to the state and merged hospitals into health enterprises. We map formal accountability relations to see whether they were changed by the reform and how they work in practice. More specifically we address the following accountability relations: Political, managerial, legal, professional and social accountability. We show that the actual accountability relations are not always tight coupled to the formal relations. It is a complex accountability pattern in which different accountability relations supplements each other.