Local Government and the FOG of Accountability
Whose Streets? Our Streets?
How is your mayor doing? It sounds like a simple question. But how do we actually know which things happening in our cities deserve the credit—or the blame—of the people we elect?
Political scientist Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, author of The Fog of Accountability, joins Chip to explore why accountability in local government is so difficult: overlapping agencies and jurisdictions, limited information, fragmented responsibility, and the growing number of public, private, and nonprofit actors involved in making cities work.
Then the conversation moves from City Hall to something much smaller: there’s trash on the sidewalk. Who’s responsible for cleaning it up?
Morgan Berman, founder of Philadelphia-based Glitter, offers a different way into that question. Glitter gives neighbors a way to pool resources, create paid local work, and take direct action to care for the places they share. But if residents take responsibility for their own streets, does that empower communities—or let government off the hook?
In the Season Two finale of The Sidewalk Ballet, two conversations about accountability become a larger exploration of civic responsibility, collective agency, and what it means to shape a city.
Whose responsibility is it?
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