The two get confused constantly, and the gap between them is where most governance failures live.
Transparency answers one question: what was decided.
Accountability answers a harder one: who decided it, on what evidence, and can that evidence be checked after the fact.
A public record that cannot be independently verified is not a control. It is a claim. And a claim you are asked to trust is the same instrument, whether it comes from a committee or a smart contract.
Verification Framework
Three questions separate real accountability from its appearance:
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Provenance : Where did the underlying data originate, and can that origin be traced without relying on the party being held accountable?
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Chain of custody : Between the source and the published figure, who touched the record, and is every transformation logged?
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Durability : Does the audit trail survive a change in leadership, a migration, or a deleted account, or does it disappear with the people who made the decision?
Leadership is judged one layer below the decision itself. Not on the outcome announced, but on whether the reasoning behind it can be reconstructed by someone with no stake in defending it.
Institutions have known this for a century. It is why audit functions report independently of the executives they examine. Decentralized systems are relearning it now, often the hard way, as on-chain votes turn out to route through a handful of addresses and multisigs no one can inspect.
The mechanism differs. The requirement does not. Structure the record so it can be verified by an adversary, not just displayed to an ally.