When Many Hands Erase Responsibility: An Islamic Governance Architecture for Accountable Multi-Agency Public Services

Purpose: Multi-agency public services can combine expertise and capacity while simultaneously weakening answerability: when several organizations contribute to a consequential decision, no actor may remain able to explain, correct, or own the failure. This article develops an Islamic governance architecture for preventing that responsibility gap.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The study uses problem-driven integrative theorization. It brings contemporary research on public accountability, collaborative governance, the problem of many hands, and blame avoidance into dialogue with Islamic normative sources and scholarship. Qur'anic principles and Imam Ali's Letter 53 to Malik al-Ashtar are read institutionally rather than as a list of managerial virtues. Concepts are retained only when they generate a defensible governance function and an operational design implication.

Findings: The analysis distinguishes distributed action from diffused answerability and derives the TRACE architecture: Task decomposition, Responsibility ownership, Authority-obligation alignment, Contestability and corrective capacity, and Evidence-preserving handoffs. A Responsibility Traceability Index is proposed as a diagnostic heuristic, and the framework is stress-tested on a multi-agency welfare service. The model shows that collaboration need not dilute accountability if public obligations remain traceable across organizational boundaries.

Originality/Value: The article reconceptualizes amana as an institutional property of public authority rather than only an individual virtue. It contributes to Islamic governance by translating normative commitments into auditable administrative mechanisms, and to mainstream accountability theory by specifying how responsibility continuity can be preserved across inter-organizational handoffs.