by Shilpa Shah
January 2006
No ‘One World’ for Accountability
The One World Trust recently launched its Global Accountability Project (GAP) framework, a set of guidelines aiming to help transnational corporations (TNCs), inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) and international non-governmental organizations increase their accountability towards various groups of stakeholders.
The framework helps organizations explore the questions of whom they should be accountable to and how the fuzzy concept of accountability can be implemented and become central to operations.
The four central dimensions described are transparency, participation, evaluation, and complaint and response mechanisms. While these are not new areas for debate, the claim that the same framework can be applied by TNCs, IGOs and international NGOs may raise a few eyebrows.
Returning more than 100 million hits on Google, the term "accountability" is found liberally sprinkled throughout our current "globalization" discourse of journals, books and sets of standards and indices concerned with the governance of powerful international organizations.
The extent to which the voice of those affected by those organizations' actions are listened to, and acted upon, forms the central tenet of the discussion.
Losing Trust
The mushrooming rhetoric around accountability is not reflected in a parallel rise in the actual performance of these organizations. As power is increasingly concentrated at the global level, public trust in most of these organizations continues to plummet and people feel disenfranchised from decisions that have direct impacts on their lives.
The prescriptions of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, the self-appointed triad of doctors to the world's economy, have long been the subject of civil society protest. And the exploitative conduct of many transnational corporations (TNCs), together with a perceived tendency to greenwash their operations with glossy reporting, is the focus of the ever-growing corporate accountability movement.
However, as the size and influence of civil society organizations has grown, the past couple of years have seen the emergence of a discourse questioning the accountability of NGOs themselves; the beam of the spotlight has been widened to the sector traditionally holding others to account.
Concerns over NGO accountability to intended beneficiaries, as well as donors and supporters, have been voiced by the business consultancy SustainAbility, by the EU in a recently proposed Code of Conduct for NGOs and by the less coherent rantings of the American Enterprise Institute, which seems suspicious of the concept of nonprofit endeavor altogether.
Questions have been raised about NGO funding, possible links to terrorism, the ability to sway public opinion and the participation levels of intended beneficiaries.
Friends of the Earth argues that this attention on NGOs is simply "a distraction from the much more pressing issue of corporate accountability".
Horses for Courses
There is no sound basis for trivializing the matter of NGO accountability, but we must ask whether it is helpful to consider it within the same framework as TNCs and IGOs.
David Rice of BP finds it “attractive” to use the same “lens” that focuses on TNCs to examine other types of organization. But the sheer size and financial power of TNCs and some IGOs mean that the impact they can have on people's lives and the environment will be of a very different scale to that of NGOs.
The GAP framework is an attempt to create an eye-catching, umbrella-like initiative promoting a broad understanding of accountability across different organizations. It will inevitably invite comparisons of accountability levels across different sectors -- indeed, the 2003 Global Accountability report, a precursor of the current framework, attempted to compare the accountability of 18 of the world’s most powerful organizations.
Despite One World Trust’s claims of not advocating a “one size fits all” approach to accountability, the World Bank, Amnesty International and Shell were all included in the line-up, competing against each other according to indicators measuring transparency and participation to determine which was more “accountable”.
This simplistic approach risks diluting the call for accountability in each type of organization as the systemic barriers preventing accountable, open operations within each are ignored. The differences in the institutional form of TNCs, and IGOs and international NGOs create different constraints on decision-making within them.
These constraints, of legal mandate, competition, resource availability and of moral concerns, need to be assessed according to each organizational sector if a deeper, more meaningful understanding of accountability is to be developed.
Mechanistic, top-down solutions such as the GAP framework can help raise awareness about accountability issues, especially where transparency -- giving an account -- is concerned. But the discussion on how these organizations can be held to account for any discharge of conduct must be led by the stakeholder voice if the power imbalances currently leading to the wide mistrust of international organizations are to be effectively addressed.
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This column has been reprinted courtesy of Ethical Corporation. It was first published on Nov. 2, 2005.