We live in an age dominated by the cult of efficiency. Efficiency in the raging debate about public goods is often used as a code word to advance political agendas. When it is used correctly, efficiency is important: it must always be part of the conversation when resources are scarce and citizens and governments have important choices to make among competing priorities.

Even when the language of efficiency is used carefully, that language alone is not enough. Unilingualism will not do. We need to go beyond the cult of efficiency to talk about accountability. Much of the democratic debate of the next decade will turn on how accountability becomes part of our public conversation and whether it is imposed or negotiated.

Janice Gross Stein draws on public education and universal health care, locally and globally, as flashpoints in the debate about their efficiency. She argues that what will define the quality of education from Ontario to India and the quality of health care from China to Alberta is whether citizens and governments can negotiate new standards of accountability. The cult of efficiency will not take us far enough.

Janice Gross Stein is the Harrowston Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and the director of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. A University Professor, she is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the author of more than eighty books and articles. She was awarded the Edgar Furniss Prize for outstanding contribution to the study of international security and civil-military education. She is the mother of two sons and lives in Toronto.

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