The Ombud as a Chameleon

The story most often told of the ombud is of its durability and its continuing claim to promote administrative justice. Alongside that claim is an understanding that the institution has proved highly adaptable to local conditions. To comprehend this malleability, this chapter applies four cultural biases, as developed in Mary Douglas’s grid-group cultural theory, to analyse how and why different choices have been made as to the design of the ombud in different countries. The typological model developed predicts that ombuds tend to be designed to match the administrative cultures in which they are located, taking on forms that are characterised in this chapter as either consumerist, constitutional, democratic, or tactical. Adopting this approach, and using examples from the global field of ombuds, this chapter anticipates the most likely challenges and main forms of accountability pressure that the different forms of ombud will likely experience, and it reflects on the stress points for the future evolution of the ombudsman institution.