ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how a particular developmental form of performance and accountability functioned in a civil society context. It is organised as follows. The first section provides a brief review of the accounting literature on Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) accountabilities in order to locate this work within the paradox debate of NGO accountability. This review is extended in the next section to highlight the importance of locating NGO accountabilities in micro-organisational/civil, societal and macro-political dynamics. Next section comprises the main analysis which explore how a particular mode of development accountability and performance was constructed by drawing on a progressive ideology of protestant Buddhism that incorporated both traditional Buddhist principles of spirituality and a liberal economic ideology of progress. Finally, it relates the empirical and historical analysis to the notion of the nation state to re-emphasise the significance of macro-political dynamics in explaining the historical evolution of accountability and performance regimes.
