When the old apartheid prosecuting authority was transformed and the first new National Prosecuting Authority was established in 1998, one of the main objectives of the new NPA leadership was to legitimise the power of prosecutors in the eyes of those they had until recently suppressed. They envisioned prosecutors, as I mentioned before, as ‘lawyers for the people’ (Barrell and Soggott 1998; Schönteich 2001: 1). To be accountable became an important and desirable good in that transformation process.

Are the NPA and the prosecutorial profession accountable today? Are they more accountable than before 1994? While I showed in Chapter 1 that the accountability mechanism governing the NPA and its employees has been clearly diversified and intensified since 1998, I also argued at various stages of this book that whether accountability has been rendered depends to a large extent on the involved actors’ understandings of the concept.

This is a book about accountability. More specifically, it is about quantitative accountability and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) in South Africa. I am interested in how prosecutors, who have the power to call others to account for wrongdoing, are themselves held accountable Central to this study is the role played by recently introduced performance measurement systems in the way prosecutors are held accountable. I explore how these measurement systems shape and influence South African prosecutors’ understanding of accountability and their prosecutorial practices.I ask whether there are significant implications for legal work, as the language of ‘performance statistics’ ‘indicators’ ‘targets’, ‘rates’ and ‘rankings’ is becoming common parlance within the judicial system.

While numerical representations are gaining increasing importance for the demonstration of accountability in many government and non-government settings in the twenty-first century, the effects and consequences of this for our social, institutional and political life are relatively opaque.

The ethnographic study of multi-local organisations provides the researcher with a challenge, ‘given ethnography’s focus on local places, on small scale, more or less observable social units and the cultural meanings and practices that constitute them’ as Merry states(2006: 980; see also Czarniawska 2008: 5). The ethnographer’s units of observation – her field sites – are harder, for example, to locate within a national state organisation like the NPA whose over three thousand employees work simultaneously in nine different provinces in national and regional head offices and in hundreds of district, regional and high courts, scattered around South Africa.

Performance statistics, indicators, rates and targets were a common feature in the working world of most prosecutors who I observed and interviewed. During the hundreds of hours of ethnographic fieldwork conducted within the NPA between 2008 and 2012, they often discussed their work and their daily concerns in terms of NPA statistics or with regard to specific NPA performance rates and indicators, both with each other and with me. For example, lower court prosecutors would refer to cases which could be finalised quickly – namely cases where the offender pleaded guilty at first or second appearance or where the case would be mediated or diverted away from the criminal justice system – as ‘good for the stats’ or as ‘assisting them in achieving their target’ during these informal tea or lunch break conversations.

Accountability always involves at least two parties (‘A’ and ‘B’): A, who has been entrusted with authority, discretion and/or money and who has therefore the duty to take responsibility and explain and justify certain actions and decisions to B; and B, who has some form of authority to compel A to act in a particular way and who has the right to ask questions and to demand an account from A about what she did or did not do (Sinclair 1995; Mashaw 2006; Messner 2009). A crucial moment in this relationship is, according to various accountability scholars, that those to whom accountability is to be rendered, have to be convinced – after they received the accounts – that accountability has indeed been rendered. They state that while expectations of how accountability should be demonstrated are never static (Dowdle 2006), they often have a ‘cultural stamp’ (Strathern 2000a: 2).

Social scientific studies, which focus on the effects of performance indicators and rankings on specific organisational fields, often include accounts of individual professionals whose reaction and attitude towards performance measurement can be summarised as critical, cynical and sometimes even fearful.Sally Engle Merry(2011: S87), who investigates the rapid increase internationally of the use of indicators to monitor like for human rights compliance, describes human rights activists who ‘(u)ntil the 1990s [ … ] resisted the use of indicators because of concern about lack of data, oversimplifications, and bias. [ … ] Indicators measure aggregates, while human rights are held by individuals’. The criticism from activists was that the specificity of the human right, its individual violation and the country’s specific context might be overlooked or misrepresented when international organisations begin to use indicators to calculate something like a human rights compliance rate.

The previous chapters have shown that there is one powerful community (“the GDP multinational") which is being challenged by a heterogeneous and weakly organised community (“the Beyond-GDP cottage industry). The ever-expanding range of Beyond-GDP initiatives will not lead to success however. A new strategy is based on the GDP success story and aims to create an institutionalised community with a clear goal and coherent structure based on a common language. The chapter argues that the community should not be based on the SDGs, green accounting or the SEEA. It also argues that the community should not be based on economic terminology and theory but rather on multidisciplinary building blocks such as stock/flow accounting, networks and limits. The aim of the community is to enhance well-being and sustainability and one of its most important features is its common language: the System of Global and National Accounts (SGNA). The SGNA has four system accounts (environment, society, economy and distribution), which describe how the systems are developing. However, this does not yet tell people whether the developments are good or bad. This is left to the quality accounts.

The system accounts in the previous chapters provide a description of the developments of the environment, society and economy as well as the distribution. But the accounts do not answer the question: Are things getting better? In the Global Quality Accounts (GQA), the data from the system accounts are assessed using a quality perspective. In economics, welfare economics and the capital approach are most common, but there are many others as well, from social sciences or natural sciences. There is no perfect approach, just multiple ways of looking at systemic progress. Each of the systems leads to a quality indicator, which provide society with different views.

The Global Economic Accounts (GECA) are based on the System of National Accounts (SNA). The SNA framework is however changed in two directions. Firstly, the economy is not measured only in monetary units but also in physical values. Secondly, the idea of measuring the economy from a network perspective is explored.

The basis for the Global Environmental Accounts (GENA) that are proposed in this book are the internationally agreed System of Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA). However, some economic terminology and the focus on the national boundaries are removed from the framework. This chapter also looks at stock/flow accounting and the network perspective of species and ecosystems as well as the idea of planetary boundaries and other environmental limits to nature and resources.

GDP is the most influential indicator in the world. It is published all over the world and there is a powerful logistical infrastructure (the "GDP multinational") which involves national statistical offices, international institutes, policy researchers, academics, media and society. Yet GDP is not a good measure of sustainability or well-being and this is why hundreds of alternatives have been proposed in the last decades. This "Beyond-GDP cottage industry" is expanding all the time but there is no sign that it is going to threaten the dominance of GDP anytime soon. Replacing GDP by 2030 provides a strategy to overcome this situation by 2030 and Chapter 1 provides an outline of the arguments made in the book.

The Global Societal Accounts (GSA) answer some fundamental questions about society: How many are we? Who are we? How are we organised? What do we do? Stock/flow accounting can be used to create demographic accounts using characteristics such as age, education and skills. A network perspective can be used to connect concepts such as social capital and institutions. The final accounts of the GSA are the time use of all individuals in society.

The Global Distribution Accounts (GDA) are based on the work that has been done on the distribution of income and wealth in the last decade or two. However, this chapter also explores the distributional relationships between companies, households and governments, and explores the dynamics within these sectors (e.g. the differences between multinationals and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Finally, this chapter explores non-financial inequalities such as health, education and social networks.

This final chapter assesses the feasibility of the ideas proposed in this book. It concludes that many parts of the project are feasible because the scientific knowledge exists and in many cases databases have already been produced. Also, the split into system and quality accounts allows for structured multidisciplinarity to be implemented. A practical problem is organisation and implementation of this programme.