Introductory Essay: Paradise Lost? NGOs and Global Accountability

Many scholars use the concept of global civil society to understand the political meaning of nongovernmental organizations ("NGOs"). Global civil society refers to the transnationalization of social life. It denotes a realm in which people interact across borders outside their identification with a specific state or with their role as a producer or consumer. Over the past half century, innovations in communication technologies and less expensive air travel have made it easier for people to communicate, organize, and express their aspirations across state boundaries. A consequence of this is that people have been forming networks, advancing shared agendas, and coordinating political activities throughout the world. The rise of organizations such as Amnesty International, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Greenpeace, and Human Rights Watch illustrates these phenomena and, for better or worse, global civil society has become a preferred term for describing the realm of collective life within which these groups operate. Scholars use the term global civil society to suggest that NGOs are not simply self-interested actors working the world political system for private gain, but also reflect a modicum of civic-mindedness at the global level. According to many political theorists, voluntary political engagement itself has a way of instilling habits of cooperation and public spiritedness within an organization and enhancing collaboration and social solidarity outside it.1 This takes on added relevance at the transnational level in that NGOs working in more than one country often strive to speak in universalist terms, claiming to advance agendas attractive to people throughout the entire world or at least a sector of people throughout the world. They aim, in other words, to find resonance with various publics and this requires an attempt to espouse civic-minded messages or, at least, to dress their parochial messages in cloaks of civic-mindedness. NGOs have been largely successful at disseminating such a view of themselves. Many years ago, Hedley Bull said that "most states obey most agreed rules of international law most of the time."2 A similar statement can be made about NGOs: most people like most NGOs most of the time. Millions of people give them money; governments look to them as partners in governance; and the UN and other intergovernmental organizations ("IGOs") find them essential to providing legitimacy and expertise to IGO activities. Notwithstanding widespread appeal, a number of scholars and practitioners are beginning to question the public-spiritedness of NGOs. While many NGOs perform admirable work, there are plenty that pursue goals many of us would find abhorrent. Moreover, even those NGOs with whom we share political aims are not beyond criticism and deserve public scrutiny. These issues have forced observers to ask difficult questions about NGOs: Who elects them? Who appoints them as spokespersons for world society? To the degree that NGOs seem like conveyors of the global civic-mindedness, on what basis do they purport to understand, let alone embody, the global public interest? Behind these questions sits the issue of accountability. When we think about political actors and even political structures, we almost always wonder about their legitimacy, and this often rests on their being answerable to a broad-based constituency. Criticism about NGOs turns largely on the same concern. To whom are NGOs accountable? On what basis should we treat them as legitimate political actors? Providing justification for, and practical implementation of, legitimate political power has been one of the longest and most formidable challenges for political theory. In the modern era, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others continually reflected upon how to constitute and maintain legitimate, authoritative political power. Almost across the board, each suggested that the answer lies in creating some form of constitutional or institutional constraint. …