Alliance Online - September 2007

Civil society feels shadow of urgency on accountability

Alejandro Litovsky

EVENT CIVICUS World Assembly
Date 23-27 May
Venue Glasgow, Scotland
Organizer Accountability: Delivering Results

The world’s problems are caused by unaccountable leaders. This was the view of 40 per cent of those attending this year’s CIVICUS World Assembly in Glasgow. More than a thousand participants voted electronically in response to provocative questions in a crowded opening plenary. The World Bank was voted the most unaccountable institution, just ahead of the Government of Zimbabwe.

Besides the celebration that is any civil society summit, the Assembly’s overarching theme, Accountability: Delivering Results, projected a shadow of urgency for two reasons. First, because NGOs are challenged on their legitimacy, accountability and delivery of results. Second, because, realistically, not much has happened with regard to the Millennium Development Goals.

Who is responsible for ‘delivering’ development? As goals proliferate, resources and resource providers multiply, and new players, such as business or massive global partnerships, enter the fight against poverty, this question has never been more urgent. Alongside the technical challenges of compliance and reporting on development projects, the CIVICUS Assembly showed a growing recognition that development, at its heart, must be about building mutual accountability.

The workshops had people buzzing along the corridors. They dealt with the accountability of corporations, the media, governments, civil society, international institutions – in fact, almost everyone. But for me what stood out on the programme was a series of workshops where donors talked about partnerships.

One, led by the UK’s Department for International Development, explored ways in which donors can work effectively with civil society. Another, themed ‘money matters’, featured the Big Lottery Fund and the Norwegian NORAD. ‘Intelligent funding’, it was said, should look at funding flows along the entire funding chain, showing what percentage of funding reaches beneficiaries.

I found these events notable: seeing important donors taking the trouble to go to a civil society meeting in Glasgow is an indication that the topic is more than a passing fashion. Those workshops all concluded the same thing: donor-NGO relations should become more like partnerships.

Accountability in partnerships

The opportunity needs to be taken seriously. A recent report by AccountAbility, Development and Accountability, finds that partnerships are not more accountable than other institutions, in fact the contrary: that unequal power between partners – and competing accountabilities – often results in unexpected new forms of unaccountability. The right governance systems don’t magically grow out of collaboration.

The report also finds that building the collective voice of the poor remains a major task. Poor people understand and value accountability. But ensuring participation by the poor continues to be a paramount challenge for ‘collaborative’ projects. It requires the social and political organization of the poor.

For civil society, the lack of knowledge about collaborative governance is a strategic disadvantage, both when they play the watchdog role in public-private partnerships for delivering public services and when they have to negotiate a partner relationship in initiatives led by the private sector.

From integrated forest management in Canada to anti-corruption pacts in India, everyone agreed that collaboration is the way to achieve social change. AccountAbility’s workshop brought together civil society leaders from Indonesia, Brazil and Russia to debate how realistic it is, from a developing country perspective, to improve mutual accountability in such collaborative initiatives. The priorities that emerged include:

address the risk of ‘capture’ of civil society organizations that enter collaborative initiatives;
provide civil society with strategies to create ‘accountability compacts’ between players to overcome power inequalities, and guidance on how to demand accountability of powerful partners without straining relationships;
research the conditions under which a collaborative initiative can transform rather than reproduce existing power relationships;
define how/where to place beneficiaries in the accountability process in collaborative initiatives when they are not sitting at the table as partners;
provide guidance on how to build mutual accountability provisions into regular NGO project proposals and activities by, for example, having more time for joint learning between partners and beneficiaries.

What happened to climate change?

I was struck by the absence in the Assembly of a strong message on climate change. Perhaps because the debate is moving so fast, May already seems a long time ago and a quick look at the global climate ‘political architecture’ reveals a changing landscape for civil society.

First, a highly entrepreneurial business sector advocating for tighter CO2 regulation through civil coalitions has surprised many. Examples are the US Climate Action Partnership, which includes global NGOs, and the Combat Climate Change (3C) business leaders’ group in Europe. The market models and targets they advocate assume perfect accountability over the assignment of carbon permits and selection of ‘carbon offsetting’ projects in poor countries. Yet the accountability of these partnerships – and the ideas that would strengthen their proposals – is not picked up by civil society’s radar.[1]

Second, development finance is gearing up. The international system is preparing to invest billions of dollars in adaptation activities in poor countries through the future Adaptation Fund (a Kyoto Protocol-related mechanism), and a robust response is needed to the fears that fraud and verification problems could spell the failure of these projects. Global cross-sector initiatives, such as the recent $100 million HSBC Climate Partnership with four international NGOs, are moving fast to invest in the climate crisis. These will no doubt spur much activity from NGOs moving to get a piece of the action.

A role for civil society?

Civil society’s links to grassroots movements, citizens and poor communities could bring decisive leverage in proposing a more just new world order: bringing accountability to funding decisions, to offsetting development projects, and to global business partnerships. For this, NGOs will need to demonstrate accountability to their constituents in order to sustain their legitimacy and voice.

In 2008 – and beyond – the global response to climate change will boost partnerships of both the good and the misleading sorts. Interested donors will multiply. Businesses will increase their social funding, as well as invest in carbon offsetting projects in developing countries in order to become ‘carbon neutral’ while maintaining their own CO2 emission levels. Increasing climate accountability will be a difficult task, while new actors and new leaderships are already redefining the terrain for civil society. Their action and leadership in the climate change agenda is urgent.

I left the CIVICUS World Assembly thinking that civil society has a strong role to play in improving collaborative governance. Better messages are needed regarding the accountability of partnerships. But a ‘collaborative’ era also threatens to leave civil society’s leadership behind as the most powerful institutions, from the World Bank to transnational corporations, adopt the language of partnership and collaboration.

The main thing, however, is that partnerships, as other development institutions, find it difficult to be responsive to the poor. This continues to be the major, unfulfilled task.

1 M K Dorsey, ‘Green Market Hustlers’ (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, June 19, 2007). http://fpif.org/fpiftxt/4313

Alejandro Litovsky is Senior Adviser to AccountAbility. Email alejandro@accountability21.net

For more information
To read the Assembly’s main position paper, David Bonbright and Srilatha Batliwala’s Answering for Ourselves: Accountability for citizen organizations, go to www.civicusassembly.org

To read an interview with Alejandro Litovsky at the CIVICUS World Assembly, go to www.civicusassembly.org/default.asp?page=259

To download Development as Accountability, go to www.accountability21.net

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