How Territorial Financial Governance Complicates Vertical Relationships in the Multi‐National United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

The United Kingdom is an asymmetric polity, in part because it is a multi‐national state brought together by conquest and voluntary union. The 1998 devolution settlements for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland were conceived and implemented in the context of UK membership of the European Union (EU). This constitutional context conditioned the implementation of vertical public service reforms, including the accounting components of New Public Management which are powerful vertical integrators. To analyse the tensions between vertical public service reforms desired by centres of government and political pressures for territorial differentiation, economization's four “roles” of accounting are interacted with the four “modes” of government accounting. Divergence and similarities between the United Kingdom, England, and the devolved nations in accounting are analysed: accrual accounting, funding model, spending control, ex‐ante scrutiny, and public audit. Accounting plays a central role in territorializing polities and in mediating relationships between tiers of government and political actors. Accounting adjudicates processes and results, relying on “independent” institutions now vulnerable to increasingly aggressive higher‐tier governments which claim superior democratic mandates as justification for subjectivizing lower‐tier governments.