The Rendering Accounts of Public Universities Under a New Model for Transparency

Universities are one of the most important institutions in our society. They are knowledge-creating organisations that contribute to the social and economic development of society through new concepts, ideas, applications, and inventions. They play a key role in social criticism, identifying key issues and contributing to informed public debates. Governance is a relatively new concept in the approach to the literature on public management. It is related to the way in which a society or organisation is governed or to the creation of conditions for the existence of a social order, triggered by collective actions. In this chapter we will study the models of university governance and analyse the problem of accountability in its context, with a view to assessing the transparency with which financial information is currently disseminated in Portugal, by public Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This analysis is based on the results collected by the author through observation on the websites of the organisations involved in the study.