Accounting for NGOs

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTION Non-governmental organizations have enjoyed a phenomenally rapid rise on the world scene. Only a decade ago, few were familiar with the acronym NGO. Today, it is on the way to becoming one of those few short-hands that has achieved nearly universal recognition. Although NGOs are hardly new to this era, as several recent histories attest,1 the end of the Cold War and the advent of globalization have empowered NGOs. The same developments that have dethroned the nation-state from its centuries-long near-monopoly on international relations have worked to enhance NGO capacities. Among other features of globalization, the communications revolution, the diminished threat of unrestrained armed conflict among states, and the increasing fluidity of national boundaries have compressed the relative powers of states and non-state actors, making the latter's rise appear all the more dramatic. It might be a bit of an exaggeration to tag this the age of non-state actors, but their rise is among the central features of contemporary global affairs.2 In the wake of this newfound power, commentators are coming increasingly to question the legitimacy of NGOs and the influence they now exert at the international level.3 This response is unsurprising, given the general perception (not all that well founded) of NGOs as working to advance progressive agendas. For those for whom national sovereignty has emerged as a rallying call, NGOs are now being lumped together with faceless bureaucrats in Geneva as the bugaboos of global governance. In this view, NGOs have mounted a sort of free-form coup against international institutions, representing nothing more than themselves. Those who resist the assertion of NGO power are perhaps most resistant to their participation in formal international decisionmaking. That seems to me exactly the wrong answer to the NGO challenge. Wherever power is exercised, questions of accountability are appropriately posed.4 One can never assume that power will be deployed in a responsible manner; indeed, where power-shifts have not yet been reflected in the decisionmaking architecture, one can assume the opportunity for abuse. NGOs now garner power independent of states and other entities; international law and international institutions, however, are still largely premised on a world in which states have the last word. Some who question NGO legitimacy would simply wish a return to the old world in which states aggregately held most associational power. That would, indeed, take care of the issue of NGO accountability. But that seems an unrealistic response. Insofar as NGO power is beyond the control of states and their intergovernmental creatures, it cannot be reversed by the policymakers. Rather, in what might be called the inclusion paradox, the accountability challenge may be better answered by formally and fully recognizing NGO power in international institutional architectures. Formal NGO participation in international decisionmaking would have the effect of outing NGO power and advancing a transparency objective. It would also hold NGOs, as repeat players, accountable to institutional bargains. NGOs now participate in international negotiations in hallways or through state surrogates. But because their participation is informal, they are free subsequently to reject results not to their liking. That threatens to keep the international lawmaking process unstable at a crucial juncture in its evolution. II. UNPACKING ACCOUNTABILITY: TO CONSTITUENCIES AND TO PROCESS The accountability card often conflates two types of accountability: internal and external. Internal accountability confronts the agency problem of representation of memberships by a necessarily limited numbers of leaders. External accountability addresses the responsiveness of organizations to larger systems of which they are a part. As deployed against NGOs, the first problem is exaggerated, and the second is better answered by elevating, not suppressing, the status of NGOs in the international context. …