Inter-Organizational Cooperation Challenging Hierarchical Accountability: The Dominated Actors in a Municipal Joint Venture

New public management offers a number of solutions to the kinds of problems that public sector organizations experience. In taking an accountability perspective, this paper elaborates on how two of these – strict responsibility for performance, and inter-organizational cooperation – may conflict. The setting for this study is a joint venture with a dominant municipality and six dominated municipalities as owners. The article examines how horizontal accountability processes may influence the dominated owners’ hierarchical accountability. The ability to account hierarchically for the quality of service within budgetary parameters is problematized, when dominated owners may dismantle their ability to demand horizontal accountability.