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Accountability
of Global Organisations Exposed
Following
the global effects of the implosion of Enron, the recent leadership
crisis at the World Bank, and evidence of the lack of accountability
of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the post Tsunami reconstruction
efforts, the importance of good governance at the global level has
been thrown into the spotlight. The subject has subsequently received
heightened recognition and today, the One World Trust, a leading
expert in the field of global governance and accountability, has
released a report at the British Parliament measuring and ranking
the accountability of 30 of the world’s most powerful intergovernmental
(IGO), corporate, and non-governmental (INGO) organisations.
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Serious global challenges such as climate change and terrorism are
growing beyond the control of national governments and global organisations
such as those examined in the report are taking on bigger roles
in finding solutions to them. The report comes at a time when there
are growing calls for these organisations to be more accountable.
Unique in nature, the report uses the Global Accountability Framework
to assess the policies and systems of organisations according to
four widely-accepted dimensions of accountability: transparency,
participation, evaluation, and complaint and response mechanisms.
Data is collected from publicly available information, documents
provided by the organisations themselves, and interviews with their
key officials. In addition, stakeholders and experts on each of
the organisations are engaged in the data collection and verification
stages of the research.
The Report identifies high performers as those organisations that
score at least 50% in 3 out of 4 dimensions. This year’s highest
performing intergovernmental, corporate, and non-governmental organisations
are:
Across all four dimensions, IGOs lead the pack with five organisations
in the top 10. Each sector, however, leads in one dimension –
whilst IGOs showed excellent transparency and evaluation systems,
INGOs showed the best participation capabilities and corporates
showed the best complaint and response mechanisms.
An annual publication that after a pilot report in 2003 and a full
report in 2006 is now in its second year, the report also identifies
that overall organisations assessed this year, have as a group performed
better than the 30 organisations assessed last year.
Says Rob Lloyd, the Report’s lead author, “The assessment
is a measure of the extent to which organisations have the policies
and systems in place to enhance consistent and coherent accountability
to the people they affect. The fact that a number score so well
shows that they have the capability to be accountable and the One
World Trust encourages them to translate these systems and policies
into actual practice.”
The Report also showed that leadership is a key ingredient in pushing
forward organisational reform towards greater accountability. On
this, Lord Malloch-Brown, Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth
Office, former Deputy Secretary-General of the UN, and keynote speaker
at the Report’s launch commented, “The report’s findings
on leadership confirm my own experiences of working in international
organisations.
When
leadership is not trusted, reform becomes next to impossible, and
the institutions become mired in political gridlock. The Report
provides global organisations with a practical road-map for reform
and I congratulate the One World Trust for this important work.”
The Executive Director of the One World Trust Michael Hammer adds,
“Accountability makes powerful organisations more effective
and legitimate. Without it, solutions to global challenges will
fail. The One World Trust are looking forward not only to continuing
to publish the Report and raising awareness of this global issue,
but also to continuing to work with organisations to provide tailored
accountability solutions.”
What
is the Global Accountability Report?
The Global Accountability Report is an annual assessment of the
capabilities of 30 of the world’s most powerful global organisations
from the intergovernmental, non-governmental, and corporate sectors
to be accountable to civil society, affected communities, and the
wider public.
The
Report uses the four dimensions of the Global Accountability Framework
– transparency, participation, evaluation, and complaint and
response mechanisms – as the basis of the assessment. Over
time, the Report will reassess organisations to track changes in
accountability and highlight progress.
The aim of the Report is to broaden understanding of and commitment
to common principles of accountability among transnational actors
from all sectors. It seeks to highlight accountability gaps, encourage
the sharing of good practice within and across sectors, and advance
accountability reform.
Why global accountability matters
Transnational actors from across the intergovernmental, nongovernmental,and
corporate sectors play an increasingly important role in global
governance. They set financial standards, deliver multilateral aid,
provide essential services, and coordinate responses to disease.
As such, their decisions and actions can have a profound affect
on people’s daily lives.
But how do we hold these organisations to account for their actions?
Current state based accountability is inadequate.
Representatives of many developing countries lack an effective voice
in the decision making process of IGOs and struggle to protect their
citizens’ interests. Furthermore, the legitimacy of political
leaders and representatives is at times questionable and citizens
actively search for other ways to make their voices heard and realise
their interests.
Equally,
globalisation is eroding the ability of states to hold large transnational
companies to account for activities that affect citizens within
their jurisdictions. New tools and mechanisms are therefore needed
at the local, national, and global level to make transnational actors
more accountable and transparent to affected individuals and communities.
The task of creating a more accountable and responsive system of
global governance could not be greater.
Accountability is not a theoretical pursuit; it’s about holding
power to account and enabling people to input into the 2007 Global
Accountability Report decisions affecting them in their daily lives.
Unless we are able to find ways of creating broad, informed participation
of all relevant stakeholders in global decision making processes,
our responses to global challenges, such as climate change, environmental
degradation, systematic human rights abuses, armed conflict, and
poverty, will fail.
Measuring accountability
At the heart of this Report is a framework based on good accountability
practice principles that defines accountability as the processes
through which an organisation makes a commitment to respond to and
balance the needs of stakeholders in its decision making processes
and activities, and delivers against that commitment.
The Report applies the Global Accountability Framework’s four
dimensions of accountability – transparency, participation,
evaluation, and complaint and response – to examine the capabilities
of transnational actors to be accountable. Within each dimension,
an organisation’s capabilities are measured by assessing the
existence of key accountability values and principles in policy
commitments and supporting management systems.
While our research has identified common principles of accountability
which transcend sectors, any assessment needs to provide room for
variation and innovation in how accountability principles manifest
themselves. Such manifestations can depend on individual organisational
history, culture, mission, and ways of working. The Report, therefore,
takes a principle based approach to assessing accountability capabilities.
This provides greater flexibility in what is measured and allows
for difference and originality to be captured.
Inevitably, variation between policy commitments made by an organisation
and what happens in practice on the ground may occur. The study
therefore does not claim to offer a full and definitive assessment
of an organisation’s accountability.
Main findings
Table 1 lists the overall accountability capabilities (total average
of an organisation’s scores across the four dimensions) of
each assessed organisation grouped according to sector. The ten
organisations highlighted in green are ‘high performers.’
These are organisations that score over 50 percent in at least three
dimensions and, as such, have the most consistently developed accountability
policies and management systems.
There are also some high performers in this year’s Report that
score over 50 percent in all four dimensions – ADB, Christian
Aid, UNDP, and UNEP. A few also exceed 80 percent in the overall
accountability score. These organisations are leading their sectors.
While they should be commended, they should not be complacent because
room for improvement remains. Furthermore, being accountable is
not an end state.
Accountability requires constant vigilance to ensure policy commitments
are being translated into practice and principles are embedded in
the culture of the organisation.
While there will always be leaders and those that lag, the gaps
that exist between the top and the bottom organisations, both within
and between sectors, are cause for concern. Global governance is
a collaborative process that involves the efforts of multiple actors
in developing and implementing solutions to social, economic, political,
and environmental challenges. If these solutions are to be effective,
legitimate, and sustainable, all actors involved in the process
need to be accountable and responsive to the people they affect.
Those who lag behind are as much a part of the process of global
governance as leaders and need to enhance their accountability capabilities.
Average sector scores across the dimensions indicate that each sector
leads on at least one dimension. IGOs score highest for transparency
and evaluation, INGOs are highest in participation (both equitable
member control and external stakeholder engagement), and TNCs come
top in complaint and response.
This is the same scoring pattern across sectors and dimensions as
the 2006 Global Accountability Report, and reinforces our message
that with each sector leading at least one dimension of accountability,
there is scope for cross sectoral learning. No sector is all good
or all bad.
The role of leadership in accountability reform
Leadership is vital for accountability reform to be successful.
While the 2007 Report’s indicators assess the existence of
leadership on accountability within an organisation, they do not
capture the role that Boards or senior management have played in
initiating and driving accountability reform. At the end of the
Report, we explore this issue through case studies on four of this
year’s highest scoring assessed organisations: Christian Aid,
GE,
IASB, and UNDP. While in each of these organizations leadership
has approached accountability reform differently, a number of common
elements have been drawn out: create a sense of urgency, identify
a vision and communicate it, support the capacities of others, and
build coalitions of support. While this section does not offer a
definitive statement on the role of leadership in accountability
across this year’s assessed organisations, we hope it will
generate discussion and provide useful information for those advocating
greater accountability within their own organisations.
Why global accountability matters
We are all more connected than ever before. Toys made in China are
bought in the US; on the internet we can read the opinions of those
in Frankfurt as easily as those in Rio.
Globalisation has brought social and economic opportunities and
political freedoms to many. Yet alongside these benefits come challenges.
The collapse of high risk lending practices in the sub-prime mortgage
market in the US led to the savings of thousands in the Northern
Rock Bank in the UK being put in jeopardy. Global travel meant that
SARS easily spread from rural China to Toronto in 2003 and subsequently
wiped off $1.5 from Canada’s GDP.
Responding to these challenges requires coordination and cooperation.
States alone lack the expertise and capacity to address the multiplicity
and magnitude of the problems we face.
The world needs organisations with the capacity to coordinate and
act across national boundaries. Intergovernmental organisations
(IGOs) such as the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP), and the World Food Programme (WFP)
play a crucial role in this. But over the past decade non-state
transnational actors such as international non-governmental organisations
(INGOs) and transnational corporations (TNCs) have also emerged
as important actors in global governance. Driven by their individual
missions and purposes, they monitor compliance with international
agreements, influence policy, participate in the setting of norms
and standards, build global infrastructure, and provide essential
services.
A selection of organisations assessed in this year’s Global
Accountability Report illustrates their emerging and varied role
in global governance. Suez provides water to millions of people
in the Middle East, North Africa, China, and South East Asia. DynCorp
International is involved in the post war reconstruction in Iraq
and Afghanistan. INGOs such as Greenpeace International or Human
Rights Watch influence and set standards on human rights, social,
and environmental issues, which affect the way firms and governments
conduct business and implement policy and laws. Christian Aid, Médecins
sans Frontières (MSF) International, and MERCY Malaysia,
meanwhile, are involved in the delivery of services in humanitarian
emergencies such as in Darfur and longer term reconstruction efforts
in Aceh. Whether these transnational actors are organised as private
businesses or rooted in civil society, they occupy the space left
open by states in policy development, governance, and service provision
and as such have a profound impact on people’s daily lives.
As the scope, power, and public influence of transnational actors
from all sectors has increased, so too have questions of their legitimacy
and accountability. The existing state based system of accountability,
including formal democratic representation, is struggling to provide
affected citizens with a voice in the processes and decisions that
affect them at the global level. Representatives of many developing
countries lack an effective voice in the decision making process
of IGOs and struggle to protect their citizens’ interests.
Furthermore, the legitimacy of political leaders and representatives
is at times questionable and citizens actively search for other
ways to make their voices heard and their interests realised. Equally,
globalisation is eroding the ability of states to hold large transnational
companies to account for activities that affect citizens within
their jurisdictions.
Clearly the state plays an important role in developing and enforcing
national regulations and international legal frameworks that enable
the global community to hold transnational actors to account. But
in parallel to state based accountability, new tools and mechanisms
are needed at the local, national, and global level to make transnational
actors more accountable and transparent to the individuals and communities
they affect.
Innovations are already emerging. Codes of conduct like the INGO
Accountability Charter, the Equator Principles, the United Nations
Global Compact, and the Global Reporting Initiative; multi stakeholder
initiatives such as the Extractive Industries
Transparency Initiative or the Ethical Trading Initiative; and certification
schemes such as the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership International
and the Forest Stewardship Council are all tools of accountability,
setting new standards against which stakeholders can hold powerful
transnational actors to account.
The task of creating a more accountable and responsive system of
global governance could not be greater. Accountability is not a
theoretical pursuit: it’s about holding power to account and
enabling people to input into the decisions affecting them.
Unless we are able to find ways of creating broad, informed participation
of all relevant stakeholders in global decision making processes,
our responses to crucial global challenges, such as climate change
and poverty, will fail.
As individuals and communities around the world are affected in
similar ways by powerful organisations, the Global Accountability
Report argues for a set of common principles of accountability for
all transnational actors. The Report reveals what individual organisations
are doing to make themselves more accountable to the people they
affect, what still needs to be done, and highlights good practice
across sectors. In doing so the Report provides a unique annual
snapshot of accountability at the global level.
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