CIVICUS World Assembly

Accountability: Delivering Results, the theme of the CIVICUS World Assembly, held in Glasgow, Scotland in June, drew over 1,000 participants. Of these, 40 per cent concluded in the opening plenary that the world’s problems are caused by unaccountable leaders.

A series of workshops featuring the likes of the UK’s DFID and Norway’s NORAD all subsequently concluded that donor-NGO relations should become more like partnerships. However, as a recent report by AccountAbility (see p00) finds, the right governance systems don’t magically grow out of collaboration, and ensuring participation by the poor continues to be a paramount challenge for ‘collaborative’ projects.

Though collaboration might be the way to achieve social change, how realistic is its achievement? At a workshop run by AccountAbility, the priorities identified included: addressing the risk of capture of CSOs that enter collaborative initiatives; developing strategies to create ‘accountability compacts’ between the players to overcome power inequalities; and defining how/where to place beneficiaries in the accountability process.

Curiously, while global cross-sector initiatives such as the recent $100 million HSBC Climate Partnership are moving fast to invest in the climate crisis, the Assembly produced no strong message on climate change. Yet in 2008, and beyond, the global response to climate change will boost partnerships of both the good and the misleading sorts, and increasing climate accountability will be a difficult task. With new actors already redefining the terrain, civil society’s action and leadership in the climate change agenda is urgent.

What came across from the Assembly is that civil society has a strong role to play in improving collaborative governance, but a ‘collaborative’ era also threatens to leave civil society’s leadership behind as the most powerful institutions adopt the language of partnership and collaboration. The main thing, however, is that partnerships, as other development institutions, need to improve their responsiveness to the poor.