The start of a new year is often a moment for reflection rather than reaction.
In that spirit, the recorded spontaneous and supportive response to my verbal deputation to the City of Edinburgh Council Full Council meeting on 18 December 2025* suggests that many attendees – and perhaps, therefore, the residents they represented – recognise that the sudden closure of St Mark’s Path previously reported in the Spurtle (Issue 357; Breaking news, 20.12.25) is not an isolated operational issue.
Rather, it points to deeper weaknesses in how public-sector infrastructure projects are governed in Edinburgh.
Failures and near failures
Edinburgh has experienced a succession of major public project failures or near failures in recent decades, including the first phase of the Edinburgh Tram project, the Scottish Parliament Building and, more recently, the Royal Hospital for Children and Young People.
Each was followed by a public inquiry, report and assurances that lessons had been learned. As 2026 begins, citizens are entitled to ask whether those lessons have led to sustained changes in practice or whether they have remained largely retrospective.
At the centre of this question lie two concepts which are often conflated but should, in my professional opinion, be kept distinct: responsibility and accountability in public life.
Responsibility
Responsibility is inherently forward-looking. In publicly funded infrastructure projects, it concerns who is entrusted with anticipating foreseeable consequences, aligning delivery with public policy objectives and exercising judgement under uncertainty before harm occurs.
Recent research shows that responsibility in such projects is inseparable from leadership, competence, skills, training, experience, institutional integrity and the capacity of public bodies to translate policy intent into delivery practice, rather than treating delivery as a purely technical or contractual exercise (Al Naqbi et al., 2024).
Accountability
By contrast, accountability is and should be fundamentally backward-looking. It concerns the obligation to explain and justify decisions already taken and to accept transparent and proportionate consequences when those decisions fall short.
Contemporary work and proven good practices of infrastructure governance in successful public-sector emphasise that accountability depends on clearly defined governance and publicly transparent governance arrangements, with visible lines of authority and an explicit focus on public value, rather than reliance on diffuse collective responsibility or procedural compliance alone (Maqbool and Sridhar, 2024).
Accountability therefore requires openness, personal integrity and leadership in accepting scrutiny and the consequences which follow, and discharge with honour.
Many citizens are increasingly concerned that both responsibility and accountability are becoming diluted. Early decisions are often attributed to collective processes, while later scrutiny is channelled into lengthy and costly public inquiries dominated by legal reasoning focused on narrow tests of ‘causative potency’.
While such processes may establish legal findings, they rarely provide timely democratic accountability or rebuild public confidence, nor do they provide for lessons to be learned about transparently discharging both responsibility and accountability with personal integrity.
While such inquiries may establish legal findings, the recommendations which follow seldom result in clear personal consequences for failures of responsibility or accountability. Nor do they consistently rebuild public confidence or demonstrate that lessons have been fully learned and implemented. In doing so, they risk obscuring the timely and practical lessons required for the transparent and responsible exercise of public authority.
The importance of the ordinary
The sudden closure of St Mark’s Path matters precisely because it is an ordinary piece of public infrastructure on which everyday civic life depends.
It shows how foreseeable impacts on access, local businesses, children, disabled users and everyday movement continue to be treated as secondary considerations, rather than as central tests of good governance. When these impacts are repeatedly borne by local communities, trust in public institutions is weakened.
As Edinburgh looks ahead to a new year of ambitious public programmes delivered within tight financial constraints, restoring a clearer and more honest relationship between responsibility and accountability in the delivery of public-sector infrastructure projects is not an abstract governance debate. It is a matter of democratic accountability in the interests of hard-working, tax-paying citizens and the many stakeholders who live with the consequences of public-sector projects.
A positive change is long overdue.
Dennis J. O’Keeffe
[Independent Infrastructure Advisor; Accredited Project Director; Researcher; Ó'Cuív and Company, Edinburgh.]
Note
- For readers who wish to consider this directly, the deputation is publicly available via Edinburgh City Council’s webcast library here. My brief verbal contribution to the Full Council meeting of 18 December 2025 begins at 00:40:19 and concludes at 00:48:45.
References
Al Naqbi KKM, Ojiako U, Al-Mhdawi M, Chipulu M, Dweiri FT, Bashir H, AlRaeesi EJH (2024) ‘Public policy implications in publicly funded infrastructure projects’, Smart and Sustainable Built Environment, online first. DOI forthcoming.
Maqbool, R. and Sridhar, H. (2024) ‘Governing public–private partnerships of sustainable construction projects in an opportunistic setting’, Project Management Journal, 55(1), pp. 86–101. https://doi.org/10.1177/87569728231214227
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