Stand up and be accountificated
OK, I made up the word 'accountificated'. Seriously, though, accountability is a 'good thing' - one of those principles like democracy or sustainability that no person of goodwill could be against, and one that should by no means be misunderestimated. Right? Well, it depends what you mean.
Power without accountability?, the Global Accountability Report 2003 from the London based One World Trust, is an attempt to assess what this contested word actually means on the global stage. What is most striking about the report is that it aims to compare three very different kinds of organisations:
- Trans National Corporations such as Rio Tinto and Aventis;
- International Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) like Oxfam and CARE; and
- International Governmental Organisations such as the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank.
The pilot report measures 18 organisations against two dimensions "necessary if not sufficient for accountability": member control of an organisation, and access to online information.
Amnesty International comes top of the list for member control, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) for access to online information. The International Federation of the Red Cross comes top when scores under both criteria are combined.
It may tickle some fancies to see Nestle and its arch critic Oxfam graded on the same scoreboard, but does it make sense? "Yes" says Simon Burall, one of the report authors at One World Trust. "It comes down to a question of trust". No less than business, where the issue was highlighted at last month's World Economic Forum , non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are increasingly being challenged. "Unless they meet this challenge their power and influence will decline."
Globolog attended a recent workshop ago where major NGOs and leading civil society scholars discussed the report with its authors. Their response: yes, accountability is great, but to whom and for what?
Meghnad Desai called it a good effort. His own experience, as joint originator with Mahbub ul-Haq, of the UN Human Development Index suggested that simple quantitative scores could have real political impact and serve progressive goals.
But, noting that Rio Tinto and the World Trade Organisation came high on the joint scores, he cautioned that an index should not conflict with what he saw as "common sense". NGOs, said Desai, were under attack from a number of quarters in an uneven battle. "Nestle and Shell have tremendous resources to throw at satisfying accountability requirements. NGOs have much more limited resources which can often be better applied."
Charles Owusu, an Impact Assessment Facilitator working for Action Aid in Sierra Leone and other African countries, said his organisation's priority above all was on "downward accountability" to the very poor communities they were trying to serve. Accountability to donors, be they the UKs Department for International Development (DfID), multilateral agencies, individuals, was important but it is just part of the picture.
From Pune in India, John Samuel, Executive Director of the National Centre for Advocacy Studies whose web site receives over 600,000 unique users every month, said there could be a danger in measuring things because they are easy to measure rather than because they are important. Accountability as defined in some international policy discussions would actually threaten some of the smaller and most vital voluntary groups, particularly in the South, he said.
Samuel pointed to at least two ways this might happen. Firstly, a proposed International Development Standard Organisation which would award its marque only to NGOs who passed certain tests. "Grassroots organisations [which do much of the best and most important work] would be wiped out." Secondly, while transparency in accounting was obviously a good thing, one of the dangers for NGOs in some parts of India was that if they published full accounts organised crime would have a better road map of how much to extort from whom.
Niall Watson of the World Wide Fund (WWF UK) welcomed the report but said that the very breadth of the survey made it something of a blunt tool which missed important aspects of how organisations address accountability in practice. He said that the issue of stakeholder consultation - one of the key tenets of accountability - posed interesting problems for organisations like his. "We consider wildlife, the natural environment and future generations to be amongst our stakeholders. It's not clear how we consult them as we do more traditional stakeholders like members, donors, or local communities".
Another participant in the workshop said that international governmental organisations like the World Bank were one step ahead of some major non-governmental organisations with which he had worked closely, in that at least they had representatives of recipient countries in the room when making decisions. One thing that would help, he thought, would be for Northern NGOs to be absolutely frank about just how large the expenses were in making projects in the South actually work. There was no need to hide this, as some of them did.
Questions about accountability in the corporate sector will be an important part of openDemocracy's unfolding debate Corporations: Power and Responsibility.
Everybody wants to rule the world
If I ruled the world, every day would be the first day of spring. Until that happy day you may like to consider some of the alternatives on offer.
Proposals for transcending the failings of existing international governmental institutions are not thin on the ground. Recent openDemocracy articles show how networks (supposedly "oh, so very nineteen-nineties, darling!") continue to appeal as a solution both to radical anti-capitalists like Ezequiel Adamovsky - and some of those who do pretty nicely under the existing global order thank you, such as the World Bank's Jean-Francois Rischard. Meanwhile, Susan Richards and Dave Belden reflect on the World Social Forum and World Economic Forum as laboratories for innovation.
Other proposals range from the hugely broad to the craftily incremental. At one end there are proposals for a parliament for the planet (heck, in Star Wars it worked on an intergalactic level so why shouldn't it work on one little planet?). Writing for the World Social Forum, George Monbiot argues, "Its not a question of removing further powers from nation-states or from their citizens, but of democratizing those powers which are already being wielded supranationally". Some elements in Monbiot's case are explored in an interview with openDemocracy.
Back on Earth, Dan Plesch of the Royal United Services Institute has argued for a way of democratising existing institutions. Countries, he says, should start sending elected politicians, not civil servants, to meetings of organisations like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the United Nations. "This would make the process far more open and clear as politicians exist to make change and get in the public eye, whereas the whole culture of diplomacy is just the opposite." Plesch thinks this proposal has the merit of being achievable in a short period of time.
With the spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF just two months away (12 - 13 April 2003), governance of these institutions is coming under increasing scrutiny. NGOs like the Bretton Woods Project and Christian Aid (UK) say there is a short "window of opportunity" to effect some change.
The Development Committee - the supreme decision-making body for World Bank strategy - will discuss reforms to the governance structure at the meeting. It has commissioned a review paper ahead of time. One well-placed aid ministry official told the Bretton Woods Project that they "were not expecting anything particularly radical and earth-shattering from the World Bank staff".
So, with the very ground quaking beneath their feet, here come the NGOs. In Options for Democratising the World Bank and IMF, Christian Aid calls for reform in five areas: voting in the boards; the allocation of seats; support to Executive Directors of developing country constituencies; transparency of the Boards; and in the selection of leadership. For more information or to give feedback, contact Paul Ladd or Jennie Richmond at Christian Aid, Tel: 00-44-20-7523-2103 / 2240.
The case argued by Christian Aid is worthy of attention and debate. It needs to be put in a larger context. For this, see Reinventing the World Bank, an anatomisation of what its authors see as the pathology of this massive bureaucracy. Summing it up in a sound bite for Globolog, editors Jonathan Pincus and Jeffrey Winters put it this way: The World Bank mission has expanded way beyond its capacity. It needs to do less better. Unfortunately, the political will in Washington, where it really counts, to deliver the necessary changes is not there.
HIV/Aids - getting it wrong by going it alone
In his State of the Union address, US President George W. Bush made what has been described as an "historic breakthrough" by pledging $15bn of US support (about $10bn of it new money) over the next five years to the fight against HIV/Aids in Africa and the Caribbean.
The plan was broadly welcomed by Jeffrey Sachs whose call for a programme for "Weapons of Mass Salvation" was noted in Globolog last October. But, writing in The Financial Times on 3 Feb 03, Sachs pointed to what he sees as serious shortcomings in the US approach:
The US, as is its wont these days, has decided to go it alone. The new programme is designed to be run by US agencies rather than going through the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, the international initiative that is best placed by far to achieve the global goals of curbing the three pandemic diseases. Of the new US funding, only $1bn over five years is to go through the Global Fund
As a recent convert to the war on Aids, the US administration has latched on to a simplistic vision of what to do, based on the example of a single country - Uganda. It knows little of the measures already in place in different parts of the world and has not recognised that each country needs to shape the best local response. It is here that the Global Fund plays an important role.
The Global Fund is organised as a consortium of donors and recipient countries, civil society and business. It is set up to encourage rigorous and sensible plans that meet local needs. Specifically, the Fund invites the leading stakeholders within each recipient country - governments, academia, non-governmental organisations, civil society - to prepare a unified national plan. If this is approved by the Fund, it is supported by a single pool of unified financing. To ensure results, the Fund insists on a technical review by an expert panel as well as an extensive system of monitoring, evaluation and audits once a programme starts.
What is the US government up to? Globolog would really like to see a coherently argued, evidence-based defence for their approach.
The challenge of HIV/Aids in Africa combines with another catastrophe in what Alex De Waal terms 'new variant famine'. A striking illustration of this comes in a short report by Rajesh Mirchandani for BBC Online on 8 February:
The food crisis in Malawi is now so severe that some of the worst-hit people are reduced to eating grass. Aid agencies fear that nearly a third of the population - about 3.3 million people - face starvation in the coming months if relief funds dwindle and erratic weather does not bring much-needed rain in time for the harvest."
It can get worse. As Chris Marrow argues in a forthcoming article for openDemocracy, HIV/Aids has destroyed those who would have grown the food that could have been stored for such bad times.
Marrow argues that change within African society is central to lasting solutions. But foreigners can surely help. The recent announcement of a joint initiative by the United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids and the World Food Programme sounds like a promising move.
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