Commentary on the Democratic Accountability of Non-Governmental Organizations

The essays on the accountability of non-governmental organizations ("NGOs") in the spring issue of this journal were so thoughtful and balanced that all I can do is to make explicit some points that seemed implicit, particularly in the essays by Kingsbury, Spiro, and Wapner. Accountability is not a pure good. Much of the writing on accountability seems to imply that accountability is like friendship: more is better. But as Kingsbury observes in passing, "the total possibilities for participation are inescapably constrained by the need to accomplish the institutions tasks."1 Too much accountability could hinder NGOs from performing their tasks, as itemized by Spar and Dail in their typology of NGOs.2 It is important to distinguish internal from external accountability, as the essays by Spiro and Wapner do. NGOs often have weak institutions for internal accountability, but on the other hand, their members can easily exit. The more important point, however, is that even effective internal accountability would not guarantee external accountability. The claims of NGOs to a voice over policy depend on beliefs that they actually speak for victims of injustice, and that they are true to the normative principles that they articulate. However, NGOs are internally accountable to their members, usually privileged people in rich countries whose knowledge of NGO policies comes largely from the organizations themselves. Clearly there is a temptation for NGOs to engage in symbolic politics, satisfying their internal constituencies at the expense of effectively fostering the values they claim to promote. The vulnerability of NGOs to exit by their members does not guarantee either effectiveness or accountability to the people whose lives they most affect. Kingsbury provides an example of such a tension, in the campaign against fur sealing that was IMAGE FORMULA5 initially promoted by Greenpeace, but that had adverse effects on the livelihoods of indigenous hunting communities in the Arctic.3 The effects of NGOs on overall patterns of external accountability depend not only on the accountability of NGOs, but on their actions to hold other entities accountable. As Spiro points out, NGOs play an important role in holding states and intergovernmental organizations accountable to broader publics, by serving as independent sources of criticism. He is right that "[g]overnments can get away with an awful lot before having to answer to their memberships."4 Certain traditional forms of accountability are irrelevant to the external accountability of NGOs, or would be pernicious. In domestic democracies, officials are accountable to electorates, but there is no world electorate that can hold intergovernmental organizations, much less states, accountable. Legal accountability is of only limited relevance. NGOs are, as Kingsbury notes, subject to national public law, but if there is an international public law, it is only emerging, and is more a set of norms that serves as a "shared starting point" than an enforceable legal code.5 I am more cautious than Spiro about holding NGOs accountable to "obligations," since it is not clear to what entities the NGOs would be held accountable.6 Here the author's use of the passive tense obscures key issues of politics. If NGOs are to be held accountable to intergovernmental organizations, controlled ultimately by governments, their most outstanding virtue-independence from governmental authority-would be threatened. …